Unequal Visibility: Class, Gender, and the Social Media Presence of German Parliamentarians

Political representation begins with presence (Phillips 1998) – in parliaments and, increasingly, in the digital public sphere. Yet visibility itself is unequally distributed. This paper examines how class and gender intersect to shape descriptive representation and digital visibility among members of the German Bundestag (MPs). It introduces a new, original dataset covering all parliamentarians across two legislative periods (2021–2025 and 2025–), combining socio-demographic information (gender, age, West/East background, class based on Oesch’s occupational schema (Oesch 2006)) with indicators of social media presence and follower reach across all social media platforms that MPs mention on their personal homepage. Applying Oesch’s class schema to political elites highlights the relevance of social origin for representation in parliaments. Social media presence and follower numbers are conceptualized as proxies for informal visibility and thus as an additional layer of descriptive representation (Pitkin 1972). Taken together, the papers offers an intersectional exploration of who becomes visible, who remains less visible, and how patterns of social media use differ across class and gender among MPs. Empirically, the analysis relies on descriptive statistics and logistic regression models to identify patterns associated with social media adoption and the extent of online reach. Interaction terms (class - gender & West/East - gender) are used to assess whether intersectional combinations of class and regional background and gender are associated with distinct visibility outcomes. The study advances research on political and descriptive representation by offering an intersectional account of descriptive representation that links traditional institutional attributes with digital traces of visibility. By documenting how classed and gendered inequalities persist – even in new arenas of public exposure such as the digitalsphere – the paper contributes to ongoing debates about what it means to be “represented” in the age of social media.