Euorpean Policy Analysis
The communicative power of social media extends far beyond the Internet . What happens on Facebook does not remain on Facebook , but it reaches different kinds of audiences and media outlets thanks to the use that journalists make of the content published by political actors in their social media profiles ( Burgess and Bruns 2012 ; Chadwick 2013 ; Deuze 2006 ; Mancini and Mazzoni 2014 ; Marchetti and Ceccobelli 2016 ; Van Dijck and Poell 2013 ). When politicians upload a picture on their Facebook profiles , they perfectly know that they are not communicating only with the citizens who follow their Facebook page . They are perfectly aware that the specific content they are sharing in their social media profiles represents a crucial tool to influence agenda building processes . If a politician posts a juicy policy proposal on their Facebook page , it is bound to get picked up by traditional media with the effect of providing a significant part of the electorate with in-depth information about that policy . Hence , social media and Facebook assume a pivotal role in political communication since the content posted by politicians in such media environments becomes a tool to measure what political actors think about specific policy areas .
Notwithstanding the potential role of Facebook in allowing political actors to communicate with a wide number of citizens , research on how politicians use this specific digital platform is still underdeveloped . The existing literature on Facebook is rich in terms of studies focusing on how key American politicians shape their presence in this social medium ( for example , see Bond and Messing 2015 ; Bronstein 2013 ; Gulati and Williams 2013 ; Williams and Girish 2012 ) while there is a shortage of analyses that would go beyond the American case and adopt a comparative perspective ( Gerodimos and Justinussen 2015 ; Larsson and Kalsnes 2014 ; Parmeggiani 2015 ; Samuel-Azran , Yarchi , and Wolfsfeld 2015 ). This is even more evident when considering those analyses looking at how the main political leaders of contemporary democracies communicate on Facebook . What are the main differences between American and Western European leaders ? And what about those cases lying outside the realm of Western democracies ?
Political communication literature also lacks an in-depth and systematic analysis on how the advent of social media is affecting the salience that politicians attribute to environmental issues . No research has been designed so far with the aim of shedding light on how political actors of contemporary democracies use social media to inform on environmental issues . Moreover , no research has yet tested whether existing theories and hypotheses about political actors and environmental issues apply to the communicative choices of leaders on social media . Based on these considerations , the paper aims to answer the following research questions : ( i ) Do political leaders use Facebook to inform on environmental policies ? ( ii ) And particularly , how often do political leaders talk about the environment on Facebook ? ( iii ) Lastly , who are the leaders who talk the most about environmental issues on Facebook ?
Environmental Issues and Political Leaders : A Review of the Hypotheses
Our work aims to investigate how much political leaders use Facebook to talk about environmental issues . Building upon existing research on pro-environmental attitudes and support , we propose 6 hypotheses related to features of countries ,
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