creator Otterbacher, Jahna creator Shapiro, Matthew A. creator Hemphill, Libby Enthusiasts propose that social media promotes vertical political communication, giving citizens the opportunity to interact directly with their representatives. However, skeptics claim that politicians avoid direct engagement with constituents, using technology to present a façade of interactivity instead. This study explores if and how elected officials in three regions of the world are using Twitter to interact with the public. We examine the Twitter activity of 15 officials over a period of six months. We show that in addition to the structural features of Twitter that are designed to promote interaction, officials rely on language to foster or to avoid engagement. It also provides yet more evidence that the existence of interactive features does not guarantee interactivity. Submitted by Libby Hemphill (lhemphil@iit.edu) on 2012-12-05T19:16:14Z No. of bitstreams: 1 CeDEM_share.pdf: 501200 bytes, checksum: c714851c0cf65ae951d1a37c7ade6d9d (MD5) Made available in DSpace on 2012-12-05T19:16:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 CeDEM_share.pdf: 501200 bytes, checksum: c714851c0cf65ae951d1a37c7ade6d9d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012 2012-12-05 2012

Manuscript

http://hdl.handle.net/10560/2889 Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ twitter political communication Article born digital application/pdf In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Open Access SSCI / Social Sciences Illinois Institute of Technology Affiliated department