The role of parliamentary debates in reinforcing attention to issues on parties’ social media profiles

Social media provide an ungated venue for parties to address issues they desire hoping to secure their policy- and vote-seeking aspirations. Yet, despite the notion that parties enjoy autonomy in setting their issue attention on social media, this expectation has recently been challenged. Namely, what political actors address on social media is dependent on issues that are salient in the news (Gilardi et al., 2022) and that the public deems important (Barberá et al., 2019). As such, parties are constrained by real-world problems limiting their possibilities to independently set their agendas on social media. While these findings are fundamental for understanding which issues parties address on social media, they confirm pre-existing knowledge of how parties respond to salient issues in parliaments (e.g. Vliegenthart et al., 2016). Hence, this brings into question whether political attention to salient issues in one venue can act as a re-enforcing role for political issue attention in another? In line with the current research, I argue that both parliamentary and social-media agendas are impacted by issue salience in the media and among the public. In other words, when an issue becomes salient, I anticipate that parties address this issue immediately on social media due to unrestricted and immediate access to it, which then spills over to parliamentary debates. However, while I expect social media to amplify issue attention in parliaments due to the time-dependency of parliamentary sessions that are fixed in time, my main hypothesis of this study is that parliamentary debates can reinforce pre-existing attention to salient issues on parties’ social media. This reinforced issue attention from parliamentary debates to social media is an outcome of (i) parties promoting their parliamentary behaviour and (ii) following up on the discussion that took place in the parliament. Firstly, while parties can respond to salient issues immediately on their social media via textual cues, they will hardly have any visual cues regarding their response, limiting the impact their response has (e.g. Powell et al., 2015). As such, parliaments provide a great resource to parties in terms of visual cues that demonstrate parties' responsiveness to issues. Secondly, due to restrictions in parliaments when it comes to speaking (Bäck et al., 2021), social media comes as a valuable venue to further engage in discussion on an issue with no restrictions. For example, if parties did not get a chance to respond to criticisms they received during the debate, they can do this afterwards on social media. I test this transient effect by comparing issue attention in speeches during question time sessions and looking at parties’ Facebook posts following these debates while controlling for lagged attention on social media. In doing so, I make use of the longitudinal QuestionTimeIssue dataset (Poljak and Mertens, 2022). The preliminary results from five diverse countries show how issue attention during parliamentary debates does indeed reinforces attention to issues on parties’ social media posts. These findings significantly contribute to the existing literature on political agenda-setting that takes place in parliaments and on social media.