Do Elections Influence how City Halls Communicate on Social Networks? Romanian Example

Abstract

Online communication, and especially messages transmitted through social networks, are now an essential tool for local public institutions. The current pandemic increased the reliance of citizens on messages posted online by their representatives and public servants.

Our interest in this research is to see if, in election times, their messages differ somehow from the usual pattern. This is interesting for us because, in the case of Romania, the local elected representatives are in most cases the best electoral agents of the political parties.

In Romania mayors are elected, and are some of the most visible political figures, both al local and at national level. We are interested to see how local elections influence the social media activity of the institutions they nominally lead. For this, we have analyzed the official Facebook pages of city halls around Romania, with mayors that took part in elections and mayors who did not, from all relevant political parties.