Contact us! An audit study to examine the responsiveness of political elites on social media during a Dutch election

In this paper, we report on the findings of a correspondence audit study to examine the responsiveness of political candidates on social media in relation to ethnicity. This study examines how responsive political candidates are to private social media messages (i.e., Facebook). Drawing on established theoretical insights, we focus on responsiveness of candidates to a citizen with a Dutch and non-Dutch name. More specifically we take into account political leaning and ethnicity of the candidate itself. We also pay attention to the technical side of the social media platform and how this affects responsiveness. We found no effect for discrimination based on ethnicity. Notably, we did observed a significant effect of the technical specifications of Facebook, which influence responsiveness at large.