Social network sites and political participation : attributes of the European Union's Facebook pages

The aim of this bachelor thesis was to find out to what extent the Facebook pages of the European Union’s political institutions encourage political participation. In former research, the attributes of interactivity, political discussion, connecting and networking were found to have a positive impact on offline political participation. In this study, it was investigated to what extent the Facebook pages of the European Commission, the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament share these attributes that encourage political participation. Data was gathered by directly studying the institutions’ Facebook pages. The Facebook pages were analyzed by means of a qualitative analysis and descriptive statistics. The results showed that the three investigated Facebook pages encourage political participation.