What type of questions do people ask British politicians in online Q&As?

A thematic analysis of MP’s “Ask Me Anything” Q&As on Reddit

This blogpost is the first in a two-part series which outlines the result of a study on MP’s social media Q&As sessions. This first post details the themes of questions asked, the second on the extent to which MPs answered said questions. The dissertation received a Distinction from the University of Birmingham, 2019.

It’s rare for people to directly interact with elected politicians in the UK. It’s even rarer to ask questions and get a direct personal response, instead of a standard reply made by an intern, researcher or assistant.

But that’s exactly what happened on Reddit.

Reddit is a social media platform which is mainly anonymous (or pseudo-anonymous). It boasts 330 million active subscribers, and over 1.2 million communities known as “subreddits”, ranging from as little as several users to 18 million. And a website with a sizeable British userbase and number of subreddits.

Several British MPs have conducted Q&A sessions with users of the site to date. These sessions are referred to as ‘Ask Me Anything’ (AMAs) on the website.

President Obama’s AMA from 2012 is the most popular to date

These AMAs can give several insights. Firstly it shows the things people think are important and willing to ask politicians. Secondly it can show the priorities of certain sections of society since the userbase skews male and young (Pew Research Centre, 2016). Lastly it can show that communications between people and politicians can be less toxic and abusive on social media.

In addition this work fills a gap in the political science social media literature, which has mainly focused on Twitter, and to a less extent Facebook, using what is called digital trace data, like @-messages, retweets, likes or #hastags (Jungherr, 2016). It also fills a gap in the wider “Reddit literature” I identified in my other work.