Governmental Communication on Social Media: Theoretical Challenges and Empirical Findings

The importance of information and communication for governmental bodies is widely acknowledged in political science. Recent developments have shifted communication from the offline to the online realm, especially as online settings offer a more quick and direct reach to public and media audiences, to share information and to gain knowledge about societal trends. The public sector in general, and government organizations in particular, have indeed widely adopted these social media platforms around the world. Digitalization has fundamentally altered the media environment and the strategies governmental bodies (from the local, national, and international levels) use to get their message across. In parallel, there is growing use of social media platforms among the general public, and journalists are increasingly reporting on the basis of publicly available authorities’ social media messages. These trends provide important incentives for governments to increase their communication efforts on these platforms. Acknowledged potential functions of these platforms encompass encouraging participatory democracy, transmitting information about public policies and services, and improving authorities’ image. More recently, research has emphasized the role of these platforms for crisis communication, a practice that has reached unprecedented levels with the coronavirus pandemic. Digitalization has also increased the methodological opportunities scholars have to investigate questions into governmental communication, as well as into the reception of authorities’ messages. To achieve this, the vast amounts of (textual) data and computational techniques available offer opportunities to analyze questions for which theoretic and empirical expectations are still unclear. This Section proposes a range of Panels that focus on various aspects of this developing research field. We aim to reach out to scholars of political communication in the broad sense, including (comparative) research on (internal and external) governmental communication, the interconnection between media coverage and authorities’ communication, the reception of governmental messages by the wider public, and examples of data-driven campaigns launched by governmental bodies at the local, regional or (inter)national scale. Comparative Papers, as well as those that specifically focus on theory building or provide empirical case studies are welcome. Papers can employ experimental designs, interviews survey studies, content analyses, computational methods or other relevant methods. We welcome full Panel submissions, but propose the following six Panels: 1 Studying governmental communication on social media comparatively 2 Reception of governmental social media communication by journalists and the broader public 3 Governmental (micro-)targeting and data-driven campaigns 4 Challenges in governmental communication: too few interactions? 5 Studying governmental communication online and offline in comparative perspective 6 Methodological challenges and advances in governmental communication research