Study: Elected Officials Tend To Discount Social Media Input

A University of Texas at Dallas political scientist and his colleagues have found that elected officials put much more stock in in-person communication with their constituents than they do in messages conveyed via social media.

The research, published in Public Opinion Quarterly, suggests that a social media message would have to be sent by more than 47 constituents for it to exceed the value of a single face-to-face meeting.

Dr. Curtis Bram, a UT Dallas assistant professor of political science and corresponding author of the study, said the preference for in-person communication might be linked to how officials interacted with their constituents before the advent of social media.

"Before the internet, elected officials would have been paying a lot more attention to each individual piece of communication they received because there's an upper limit on how many people are going to send you letters or how many people are going to come visit you in your office," said Bram, who also is a survey advisor for The North Texas Quality of Life Initiative, a UT Dallas project designed to deliver data and information critical to North Texas' future growth.

"Meanwhile, the number of people that might be tweeting at you or posting about you on Facebook is virtually unlimited," he said.

The researchers sent surveys to municipal- and county-level elected officials in the United States. Each of the 651 respondents was shown constituent messages about hypothetical policy decisions. The messages were randomly assigned as having been delivered either via social media or through an in-person meeting.

The researchers found that local policymakers, including mayors and city council members, strongly discounted online constituent messages compared with offline ones.

"It's extremely difficult to survey a body like the U.S. Congress," Bram said. "We chose to focus on politicians at the local level because they are plausibly receiving a lot of actual visits from their constituents while also paying a lot of attention to social media."

The amount of effort required to post on social media versus actually visiting an elected official is vastly different, which also could contribute to how the messages are received, Bram said.

"Elected officials are weighting the information that they receive in person at much higher rates. That's what they're telling us in this hypothetical survey context," Bram said.

While in-person interactions remain the most persuasive form of grassroots communication, Bram said social media still can be an effective means to facilitate a large increase in the overall levels of constituent engagement.

Other authors of the study are lead author Dr. Nathan Lee, managing director of the local and state government research organization CivicPulse, and researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Pennsylvania.

Media Contact: Jessica Good, UT Dallas, 972-883-4319, [email protected], or the Office of Media Relations, UT Dallas, (972) 883-2155, [email protected].