Opportunities and Barriers for Politicians' Interaction With Citizens on Social Media in the 2020s: An Updated Framework for Future Research

Abstract Social media has provided politicians new opportunities to engage in a continuous dialogue with citizens. While politicians did not take advantage of this potential in their early social media usage, scholars have suggested that politicians utilize social media more for interactions with citizens in the 2020s. Against this backdrop, the aim of the current study is to update the existing knowledge on the opportunities and barriers politicians experience for interacting with citizens on social media in a time, when knowledge and skills to use social media have been built up within the political system. Based on an interview study among Danish parliamentary members in 2021 ( n = 18), a most‐likely case of online interactions, we find that politicians utilize the platforms for indirect forms of interactions but only to a limited extent engage in direct conversations on social media due to limited resources and experiences of online incivility. However, the study also identifies some opportunities for direct interactions. Most significantly, politicians were more willing to interact on platforms with less online incivility. Furthermore, the interviews revealed that social media acts as a facilitator of politicians' offline interactions with citizens rather than the place, where the interactions take place. The findings have implications for how scholars ought to study politicians' online interaction behaviors.