Investigating Factors of Twitter Use among Municipal Governments

ABSTRACT

This study investigates predictors of Twitter adoption and use by municipalities for citizen communication, considering both the level of municipal Twitter presence and the level of Twitter activity. Possible predictors included municipal characteristics as well as citizenry characteristics. Participants included 100 Pennsylvania municipalities drawn from a disproportionate stratified sample, evenly split between municipalities with and without a Twitter presence. No significant correlation was found between the level of municipal Twitter presence and active use of Twitter. Regression results suggest that the likelihood of adopting a Twitter account increases with greater population size and a younger population, though only population size significantly predicts the number of Twitter accounts. Regression results also suggest that a greater population size, lesser median citizen income, and a higher number of county-level Twitter accounts influence the level of Twitter activity among these municipalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Twitter
• social media
• governance
• municipal
• communication

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Davis Muldowney, Penn State University undergraduate student, for his assistance in data collection for this project. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Pennsylvania State University’s Institute for CyberScience through the ICS Seed Grant Program.

Disclosure Statement

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, Jeffrey A. Stone. The data are not publicly available due to their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded through a grant from Penn State University Institute for CyberScience; Penn State Institute for CyberScience;

Notes on contributors

Jeffrey A. Stone

Jeffrey A. Stone is an Assistant Professor of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at the Pennsylvania State University, Lehigh Valley Campus. His research focuses on public sector use of information technology, computer and information science pedagogy, and sociological factors related to gaming.

S. Hakan Can

S. Hakan Can is an Associate Professor of Criminology at Penn State University, Schuylkill and Harrisburg campuses. His research areas are law enforcement organizations behaviour, police stress, violence and recently expended his research to opioid use as maladaptive coping behaviour of stress.