User Engagement with MPs Posts: Examining the characteristics of popular posts by parliamentarians

MPs’ social media channels have become key means for contact with the public. We used automated tools to extract all of the posts published on all Israeli MPs pages through an entire session of the parliament, and then sampled and manually coded the most popular posts. This enabled us to study the characteristics of the posts that stand out in terms of user engagement in the context of representative-citizen interaction on social media. The results portray a complex picture, according to which both the gender of MPs, as well as the format, content and tone of the posts simultaneously affect their acceptance.