Government information meets party promotion: The multiple communicative roles of cabinet ministers on social media

Despite an upsurge in social media studies, little is still known about how cabinet ministers balance their multiple roles—as heads of ministries, as members of the cabinet, and as party politicians—on social media. Social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter represent potentially very useful tools for all these different, and potentially conflicting, communicative roles. In this paper, we make two main contributions to the expanding literature on government communication and social media. First, we develop an analytical framework, based on principal-agent theory and earlier research on political social media communication, that distinguishes between the different communicative roles and goals politicians might have when communicating on social media. Second, we apply the framework in a study of cabinet ministers’ social media communication in Norway. The manual content analysis of Facebook posts (N = 1062) demonstrate that the affordances of social media cater to ministers’ needs both as party politicians and as heads of ministries, as Norwegian cabinet ministers use social media in two key ways: to inform as ministry heads and to promote as party politicians. The results suggest that social media accentuate the party political aspect of the minister role, and effects for government communication, cabinet collective unity and decision-making should be closely monitored by future research.