Keeping an Eye on the People: Who Has Access to MPs on Twitter?

Twitter is credited for allowing ordinary citizens to communicate with politicians directly. Yet few studies show who has access to politicians and whom politicians engage with, particularly outside campaign times. Here, we analyze the connection between the public and members of parliament (MPs) on Twitter in the Netherlands in-between elections in 2016. We examine over 60,000 accounts that MPs themselves befriended or that @-mentioned MPs. This shows that many lay citizens contact MPs via Twitter, yet MPs respond more to elite accounts (media, other politicians, organized interests,…), populist MPs are @-mentioned most but seem least interested in connecting and engaging with “the” people, and top MPs draw more attention but hardly engage—backbenchers are less contacted but engage more.