Power, policy and national background: understanding interest groups-legislators ties on social media in the European Parliament

The rise of social media added an important new arena for interest group activities aimed at information-gathering, accessing decision-makers and influencing policymaking. A key theoretical and empirical puzzle is what drives interest groups’ decisions to follow some legislators on social media, but not others? We examine the conditions under which EU interest groups follow MEPs on Twitter. We develop an argument highlighting the importance of shared policy preferences and MEPs’ power as main drivers of the Twitter-following decision. We argue that the effect of both factors is reinforced when legislators are interested in the same issues that organisations care for, by virtue of their specialised committee work and shared national background. We test our argument on a unique dataset recording information about Twitter ties between 6842 organisations and 80 per cent of MEPs serving in the EP8. Our Exponential Random Graph Models show that organisations are significantly more likely to follow policy-proximate and powerful MEPs, with power being a particularly strong predictor of a Twitter-following tie. Sharing national background reinforces these positive effects, while sharing interests in the same policy domains does not. We contribute to the emergent research on interest groups and social media and the established research on legislative lobbying.