Balancing Acts: The Communicative Roles of Cabinet Ministers on Social Media

Abstract

Despite an upsurge in social media studies, little is known about how cabinet ministers balance their multiple professional roles - as ministry heads, cabinet members, and party politicians - on social media platforms. In this article, we first develop an analytical framework, grounded in the principal-agent theory and earlier research on political communication, that differentiates between cabinet ministers' different communicative roles as well as different communicative purposes on social media. Second, we add to the growing literature on government communication and social media by applying this framework to analyze Norwegian cabinet ministers' social media communication. The data is based on a manual content analysis of 1,062 Facebook posts and an expansion of this data using machine learning to cover all the Facebook communication of all ministers from the Solberg cabinet (2013-2021). Based on almost 20,000 posts, the results indicate that social media caters to ministers' needs both as party politicians and as heads of ministries, as Norwegian cabinet ministers use social media in two key ways: to inform as ministry heads and to brand themselves as party politicians. Further, we find that private self-personalization increases audience engagement. The results suggest that social media accentuates the party-political dimension of the cabinet minister's role, thereby indicating potential consequences for government communication, cabinet unity, and decision-making that warrant further exploration.