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The Adoption and Use of Twitter as a Representational Tool among Members of the European Parliament

ABSTRACT Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) struggle to connect with European publics. Few European Union (EU) citizens feel connected to their MEPs. Levels of turnout for European Parliament (EP) elections are low, and EU citizens rarely retain EP-related news. For these and other reasons, we might expect MEPs to embrace social media platforms, like Twitter, that facilitate interactivity, spontaneity, personality, and informality. In reality, however, significant variation characterizes the timing and nature of MEPs’ engagement with Twitter. In this article, we document and seek to explain elements of this variation. We examine five dimensions of MEP engagement with Twitter: Do MEPs establish Twitter accounts? Are they early adopters? How frequently do they tweet? And how, exactly, do they use Twitter – do they engage in direct conversations via Twitter's @-reply functionality and/or refer followers to other content via retweeting? We find that MEPs’ approaches to Twitter are conditioned by specific personal, constituency-based, and structural/strategic variables. Our findings generate insights into the changing nature of political communication and the diverse patterns of political representation in today's EU.