Social Media and the Behavior of Politicians: Evidence from Facebook in Brazil

Pedro Bessone, Filipe Campante, Claudio Ferraz and Pedro Souza

No 30306, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study the relationship between the spread of social media platforms and the communication and responsiveness of politicians towards voters, in the context of the expansion of Facebook in Brazil. We use self-collected data on the universe of Facebook activities by federal legislators and the variation in access induced by the spread of the 3G mobile phone network to establish three sets of findings: (i) Politicians use social media extensively to communicate with constituents, finely targeting localities while addressing policy-relevant topics; (ii) They increase their online engagement, especially with places where they have a large pre-existing vote share; but (iii) They shift their offline engagement (measured by speeches and earmarked transfers) away from connected municipalities within their base of support. Our results suggest that, rather than increasing responsiveness, social media may enable politicians to solidify their position with core supporters using communication strategies, while shifting resources away towards localities that lag in social media presence.

JEL-codes: D72 H72 L86 L96 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-lam, nep-pay, nep-pol and nep-soc
Note: POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30306.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30306

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30306

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().