Legislative Twitter Style: Electoral Vulnerability,Social Media,and Constituency-Building in Large Multimember Electoral Systems

How do legislators use social media to cultivate their constituencies in large multimember electoral districts? Colombia's Senate nationwide district offers a suitable case to examine how lawmakers, through their behaviour on Twitter, geographically target their audiences. We employ microblog user geolocation methods which infer locations using textual content in order to identify where Colombian senators' Twitter ‘home’ is. We find that senators' location targeting on Twitter largely mirrors the geographical distribution of their votes. Deviations from that pattern mostly stem from their vulnerability to intraparty competition and the nature of their parties' organisation.     

The electoral benefits of environmental position-taking: Floods and electoral outcomes in England 2010–2019

The global increase in extreme weather events in recent years has spurred political scientists to examine the potential political effects of such phenomena. This paper explores effect of flooding on electoral outcomes and offers evidence that the impact of adverse events varies with changes in political context. Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy to analyse three consecutive general elections in the United Kingdom (2015, 2017 and 2019), the paper finds variability in partisan electoral benefit from one election to the next that calls into question the blind retrospection and rally-round-the-leader explanations which are often advanced to account for electoral reactions to natural disasters. Instead, changing party positions on environmental issues appear to account more convincingly for shifts in electoral support in response to flooding. This suggests that parties can derive benefit from, or be punished for, the positions they take on environmental issues when extreme weather events affect citizens.     

The role of authentic leadership on healthcare Street-Level Bureaucrats’ well-being during the pandemic

This study uses Conservation of Resources Theory, to explain Street-Level Bureaucrats’ (SLBs) workplace behavioural responses to threats to their well-being. We examine whether authentic leadership within street-level organisations positively impacts employee well-being by increasing SLBs’ perception of personal resources, and reducing their perceptions of work harassment. The research design comprises a survey that solicited quantitative and qualitative data from 163 healthcare SLBs working in Australian hospitals during the pandemic in April 2020. Analysis of the means indicates low levels of satisfaction with leadership and low levels of well-being for SLBs. The structural equation modelling findings show that poor leadership is associated with higher levels of work harassment and lower levels of employee well-being. Qualitative data support these findings. As healthcare workers were already listed as over-represented in the stress-related workers compensation statistics, one strategy may be to improve the level of organisational support by upskilling managers in authentic leadership behaviours with the aim of increasing their perception of support so as to increase employee well-being. This will benefit employees and their families, and the community they service.

Points for practitioners

• Street-Level Bureaucrats (SLBs) have been increasingly experiencing the public sector gap (demand outstripping supply of resources) because of the dominance of the austerity-driven managerialist paradigm.
• The recent COVID-19 crisis amplified the severity and impact of the public sector gap causing increased perceptions of work harassment and reductions in SLBs’ well-being.
• However, SLBs with high levels of Psychological Capital had a natural buffer in place to protect their well-being, and as such, they perceived less work harassment and erosion of their well-being.
• The way forward is to complement the austerity-driven managerialist paradigm in management decision-making with authentic leadership behaviours focused on maximising the well-being of SLBs and the public.