Party soldiers on personal platforms? Politicians’ personalized use of social media

Abstract

Social media are seen as a catalyst for personalized politics, and social media activity has, therefore, been used as an indicator of personalized representation. However, this may lead to an overestimation because politicians can behave as party soldiers even on their personal social media platforms. This article proposes that we need to examine the content of politicians’ social media communication to evaluate levels of personalized representation and understand the drivers behind it. Based on a full year’s Facebook activity of Danish members of Parliament including 28,000 updates, this study documents two main results. First, politicians do use Facebook to manage their personal image, but they also attend to their party duties. Attending to content suggests that activity measures overestimate personalized representation by at least 20 percentage points. Second, in contrast to expectations, mainly electorally secure politicians personalize communication on social media, which suggests that vote getters may enjoy more party duty leeway.