City Hall 2.0? Italian Local Executive Officials’ Presence and Popularity on Web 2.0 Platforms

Italian heads of local government have many incentives to engage with their constituents on social media and their voters may be relatively eager to respond, or at least more so than with many national politicians. By scrutinizing both elites’ strategies and citizens’ responses on social media platforms, this study aims to extend our knowledge of how and with what results a little studied category of politicians, i.e., local government executive officials, are employing social media in a context, such as Italy, in which their institutional role is quite relevant, their popularity tends to be high, and their incentives to employ these tools for constituent relationship building and management are significant because they are directly elected by voters in majoritarian elections.