Greek Parliament Members on Instagram: A study on building a political image

Abstract

This paper focuses on examining how Greek MPs leverage Instagram and carry out a twofold investigation that addresses two main questions: Do politicians prefer to communicate over Instagram their private or public life moments? How does the use of Instagram by Greek politicians affect their perception by the public? To validate our findings, we construct a dataset on Greek MPs’ attributes and proceed with its statistical description and visualization. A hierarchical, multiple linear regression framework is employed to model the number of MPs posts with respect to various predictor variables. Data is gradually introduced, creating a series of models of increased complexity and deducing whether the added predictors account for any more variance, thus either accepting or dropping the respective independent variables. Acquired models can subsequently be compared with ANOVA to determine the significance of the models’ change.