Instagramming politics: Analyzing politicians’ day-to-day activities on social media

The article analyzes the use of Instagram by German members of parliament in non-campaign times. Based on the literature on visual analysis as well as social media research, we investigate what politicians post and how they use the different features of social media platforms and Instagram in particular. First, we demonstrate that German national MPs are strongly present on Instagram across parties, gender and age groups which is why we, in a second step, closely examine the Instagram activities (N=1279) of 24 German national MPs, using a pre-defined codebook. We show that MPs predominately display behind-the-scenes images as well as state their opinion on political issues. The visibility of issues strongly depends on parties’ issue ownership and on contextual factors. Furthermore, we highlight that younger MPs have a more sophisticated use of Instagram and integrate the social media platform more strongly into their daily political activities.