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Municipalities and Facebook Use: Which Key Drivers? Empirical Evidence from Italian Municipalities

ABSTRACT New information and communication technologies are changing the relationship between municipalities and citizens. Municipalities are using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as social media to connect and interact directly with citizens. The aim of this study is to explore how municipalities use Facebook, construct a synthetic indicator to measure the use of Facebook by local government, and find out which drivers predict its diffusion through a quantitative methodology: ordinary least squares regression. A sample of Italian municipalities during 2013 is analyzed. The results suggest that the political position, the gender of the Mayor, the geographical position, the financial autonomy of municipalities, and the citizens’ wealth seem to predict the diffusion of Facebook use by municipalities.