A Bad Workman Blames His Tweets The Consequences of Citizens’ Uncivil Twitter Use when Interacting with Party Candidates

The recent emergence of microblogs has had a significant effect on the contemporary political landscape. The platform’s potential to enhance information availability and make interactive discussions between politicians and citizens feasible is especially important. Existing studies focusing on politicians’ adoption of Twitter have found that far from exploiting the platform’s two-way communication potential, they use it as a method of broadcasting, thus wasting a valuable opportunity to interact with citizens. We argue that citizens’ impolite and/or uncivil behaviour is one potential explanation for such decisions. Social media conversations are rife with trolling and harassment practices and politicians are often a prime target for such behaviour, a phenomenon altering the incentive structures of engaging in dialogue on social media. To demonstrate this claim, we use all Spanish, Greek, German and UK candidates’ tweets sent during the run-up to the recent EU election, along with the responses they elicited, and rely on automated text analysis and machine learning methods to measure their level of civility. Our contribution is an actor oriented theory of the political dialogue that incorporates the specificity of the social media platform, further clarifying how and why democratic promises of such social media platforms are fulfilled or limited.