Mediated Representation in the Age of Social Media: How Connection with Politicians Contributes to Citizens’ Feelings of Representation. Evidence from a Longitudinal Study

ABSTRACT

Modern democracies are built around the idea of representation: the electorate is represented, and perhaps more importantly, should feel represented. Yet recent decades have been marked by a growing gap between citizens and the political system. The emergence of new, more direct communication channels such as social media gave rise to expectations that the two sides can be brought closer together. This study investigates whether a connection with politicians and parties via social media platforms can enhance citizens’ feelings of being represented by a certain politician or party (dyadic representation), or by the entire parliament (collective representation). Our data come from a two-year panel study, covering four Israeli elections. Findings demonstrate that passive (receiving political information), but not active (producing political information) connection increases dyadic representation perceptions. Collective representation perceptions, by contrast, were not affected by either type of connection. Furthermore, our analysis does not demonstrate a reverse causal order; we did not find evidence supporting the idea that representation perceptions influence connection with politicians or parties. The upshot of our findings is that unidirectional communication between politicians and citizens on social media can foster citizens’ feelings of being represented in the political arena and of closeness with the political elites. That said, such effects were obtained only with regard to dyadic representation and are therefore limited in scope. The study contributes to the ongoing theoretical debate concerning the complex relations between new technologies, citizens, and political elites.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• representation
• campaign
• contact with politicians

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2022.2124335.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2022.2124335.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2022.2124335.

Notes

1. Item j (receiving a reply from a politician) was loaded on the active factor but was not included in the scale, for two reasons. The first is conceptual: This item does not measure an action taken by a citizen (although it is a direct result of such action and therefore loads on the same factor). Second, we found low variance on this item: only 6% reported having received a reply. To ensure the robustness of the findings to follow, we repeated all analyses, this time including Item j as an additional predictor, but found no consistent effect across all models. We also recalculated the active factor incorporating this item and reran the analyses, but the results were the same as the first time around.

2. We also calculated a time-varying model. Explanations on the difference between the two types of models, alongside the full results, can be found in the Online Appendix. The results of both models are similar.

3. Participants were considered as being in contact if they reported at least one of the activities listed at least once in the preceding week.

4. According to results of latent growth models, the slope for both types of connection is insignificant (Active: M = −0.24, S.E = 0.175, P = .16; Passive: M = 0.014, S.E = 0.024, P = .56).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israeli science foundation [2315/18].

Notes on contributors

Shira Dvir-Gvirsman

Shira Dvir Gvirsman (Ph.D. Hebrew University, 2011) is an associate professor at the Dan Department of Communication, Tel Aviv University. Her fields of interest are: news consumption practices and their implications on political behavior.

Keren Tsuriel

Keren Tsuriel is a PhD candidate in the Dan Department of Communication at Tel Aviv University. Her research interests are participation in elections and nonvoters, uses of social media, political communication, and psychological media effects.

Tamir Sheafer

Tamir Sheafer is a professor in the Department of Political Science and the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on actor-centered perspectives in political communication, such as information processing and personalization; on the role of political value proximity between actors; on political narratives; and on developing new methods for automated textual analysis.

Shaul Shenhav

Shaul R. Shenhav is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the incumbent of the Herbert Samuel Chair in Political Science. His research focuses on political narratives and political discourse; on developing new methods for automated textual analysis; and on Israeli politics.

Alon Zoizner

Alon Zoizner is an assistant professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Haifa. His research bridges digital technologies, modern information environments, and current political developments, utilizing computational content analysis, experiments, survey analysis, and elite interviews.

Liron Lavi

Liron Lavi is an assistant professor at the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Before that, she was a research fellow at the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. Her research interests include elections, representation, democracy, and political communication, and her empirical work has focused on elections in Israel and the United States.

Michal Shamir

Michal Shamir is the Alvin Z. Rubinstein Professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on democratic politics, including elections, party systems, public opinion, tolerance, and democratic culture.

Israel Waismel-Manor

Israel Waismel- Manor is a senior lecturer at the School of Political Science, University of Haifa. His research focuses on political attitude formation and its effects on political behavior. His most recent projects explore the ways in which nonverbal communication, physiological stress, institutional settings, and new media infl uence political preferences and behavior.