Why Do Some Mayors Generate More Citizen Engagement on Twitter?

What is it about?

This chapter examines what explains citizen engagement with mayors on Twitter in Turkey. Focusing on a non-election period, it analyzes the Twitter activity of metropolitan and provincial mayors between 17 April and 16 May 2019. The study measures engagement through a simple index based on favourites and retweets per 1,000 followers. It then explores whether engagement is associated with mayors’ personal traits, municipal characteristics, and political context. The findings show that municipal status matters. Mayors of provincial municipalities generated higher engagement scores than mayors of metropolitan municipalities, while factors such as gender, age, education, political party, mayoral term, region, and political competition were not significantly related to engagement.

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Photo by Rubaitul Azad on Unsplash

Photo by Rubaitul Azad on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Social media is often seen as a way to make local politics more direct, interactive, and citizen-oriented. However, simply having a social media account does not automatically produce meaningful citizen engagement. This chapter is important because it moves beyond asking whether mayors use Twitter. Instead, it asks which factors are associated with higher engagement. The findings suggest that institutional scale matters: citizens may feel closer to mayors in smaller or provincial municipalities, which may encourage more interaction. The study therefore contributes to debates on digital politics, local government, and e-participation by showing that engagement on social media depends not only on visibility or political communication strategy, but also on the local institutional context.

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