Likes or Laws? How Technology Can Expose Performative Politicians

In the digital age, politics increasingly unfolds on social media platforms. Visibility, followers and viral content often become the currency of political influence. Yet this raises an important question: does popularity online reflect real legislative work?

The quality of parliamentary performance has traditionally been evaluated through criteria such as competence, integrity and responsibility. However, the growing dominance of social media has introduced new incentives that sometimes prioritize communication strategies over substantive policy work.

Political leaders today can build large audiences by producing content that generates engagement—tweets, short videos or viral messages—while the more complex and less visible work of legislation remains largely outside public attention.

This dynamic risks creating what we might call “spectacle politicians”: representatives who focus more on maintaining digital visibility than on fulfilling their legislative responsibilities.

However, technology itself can also provide the tools to address this problem.

The same digital environment that amplifies political spectacle can also enable greater transparency and accountability. Through open data, parliamentary monitoring platforms and digital civic tools, citizens can increasingly access detailed information about the real work performed by their elected representatives.

For example, technological tools can allow citizens to analyze how often a legislator participates in debates, the number of bills they propose, their voting records or their attendance in parliamentary sessions.

When this information becomes accessible and understandable to the public, it becomes possible to contrast online visibility with actual legislative performance.

This transformation represents an important opportunity for democratic governance. Instead of relying solely on political narratives or campaign communication, citizens can evaluate representatives based on measurable indicators of their institutional work.

In this sense, technology can become a powerful ally for democratic oversight. By opening parliamentary data and making it easier to analyze, digital tools can help citizens distinguish between political spectacle and effective public service.

Ultimately, the question is not whether politicians should communicate through social media—they inevitably will—but whether citizens have the tools to assess their real performance beyond the number of likes they receive.

In the long run, strengthening transparency in parliamentary activity may help shift political incentives away from spectacle and back toward what truly matters: legislation that improves the lives of citizens.