CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by AIR Universita degli studi di Milano Competing Principals 2.0? The impact of Facebook in the 2013 selection of the Italian Head of State Author: Andrea Ceron, Università degli Studi di Milano,
[email protected] Abstract Motivated by the literature on ‘competing principals’, this article studies the effect of interactive social networking sites on the behavior of politicians. For this purpose, 12,455 comments posted on the Facebook walls of 423 Italian MPs have been analyzed to assess whether Facebook played a role in the selection of the Italian Head of State in 2013, enhancing responsiveness. The statistical analysis reveals that the pressure exerted through social media did not affect MPs’ propensity to express public dissent over the party line, which is instead affected by more traditional ‘principals’ and factors: seniority, primary elections and factional membership. Keywords: social media, responsiveness, Facebook, E-democracy, legislative cohesion, intra-party dissent Introduction The advent of interactive SNS has reopened the debate on whether the web can become an uncoerced public sphere (e.g., Dahlgren 2005) that enhances accountability and responsiveness. Indeed, due to their potential interactivity, SNS like Facebook and Twitter could favor participatory and transparent democracy (Avery and Graham 2013; Waters and Williams 2011), allowing citizens to play a role in the development of the democratic polity (Dahlgren 2005). So far, the literature has investigated whether the interactions that take place on SNS influence the attitudes and behavior of individual citizens (Bond et al. 2012; Effing, van Hillegersberg, and Huibers 2011; Kushin and Yamamoto 2010; Zhang et al.