Professionalized political avatars? A study of the twitter profiles of Dutch, Norwegian and Austrian MPs

Abstract

Social media has become increasingly popular the last years, with ever more people taking these online services in use. Also politicians are signing up on Social Networking Sites (SNS) in order to reach out to more voters. At the same time, it has been claimed that political communication has become more professionalized and personalized the last decades. This study focuses on professionalization in the Political Avatars, or social media profiles, of Dutch, Norwegian and Austrian MPs. Although a growing amount of research is investigating the social media use of politicians, most have focused on checking which politicians are online and how active they are. This quantitative study, on the other hand, investigates the level of professionalization and what influences this in the Twitter profiles of the MPs of the most similar system cases of the Netherlands, Norway and Austria. The findings show that older MPs have less professionalized Twitter profiles than younger MPs, that MPs from populist parties have less professionalized profiles, and that Dutch MPs have more professionalized Twitter profiles than Norwegian and Austrian MPs. Several explanations for the different levels of professionalization in the Twitter profiles were presented, as well as recommendations for future research.