Inuit, elected representatives and social media: How do elected representatives represent Inuit people and issues? - Mathieu Landriault

Inuit groups and issues have been the object of significant attention from Canadian policy-makers and media. These elites have focused on specific Inuit issues while paying little attention to others. At the same time, they have presented Inuit people and issues in specific ways, framing them as either active or passive players of their socio-economic development. Traditional media have always represented a challenge to study how elected representatives thought. These media have acted as filters, facing significant content and format limitations as well as selection biases.

Recently, with the emergence of social media, elected representatives do not need to go through an intermediary (traditional media and reporters in order to spread their political communication. We contend that it offers scholars opportunities to study and analyze the nature of their political communication and their interactions with society at large.

Using the Eureka database, we intend on analyzing tweets published by Canadian elected representatives on Inuit issues and people from 2014 to 2016. This timeline allows interesting insights since it encompasses the last year of the Conservative government led by Stephen Harper and the first year of the Liberal government, led by Justin Trudeau.