Constituency references in social media: MPs' usage and voters' reaction

Abstract Social media platforms offer MPs the opportunity to directly signal attention to their local voters in the constituency. And while previous research has linked the strategic use of such local cues in social media posts to electoral motives, we know very little about their effectiveness. In this study, we trace the impact of local cues in social media posts in three steps. First, we revisit the claim that MPs are electorally motivated in their use of local cues by analysing 1,316,458 Tweets by Swiss and German national MPs (2009–2019). Second, we use survey experiment data ( N = 16,597) to gauge whether voters reward local cues in social media posts with a higher likelihood of voting for a politician. Lastly, we investigate whether MPs' use of explicit local cues in Tweets leads them to obtain more preference votes in Swiss National Council elections (2011–2019). The overall image that emerges from these results is that while politicians use local cues particularly when campaigning, they are not directly electorally rewarded: both the results based on experimental and observational data do not provide evidence for the idea that adding local cues to social media posts comes with an electoral advantage.