Instagramming politics: Analyzing German MPs’ day-to-day activities on social media in non-campaign periods

Abstract

This article investigates how members of the 20th German Bundestag use Instagram during non-campaign periods. Drawing on research on visual political communication, platform affordances, and the professionalization of digital political communication, we introduce the Instagram Complexity Index – a novel measure of how extensively posts leverage Instagram’s interactive and multimedia features. We analyze 1279 posts by 24 MPs across two 2-week periods in 2022 using a standardized codebook and test the Instagram Complexity Index empirically. We demonstrate that participatory posts that address audiences directly are significantly more complex, while posts focusing on constituency-level or international politics, as well as environmental issues, tend to use fewer platform and interactive features. Moreover, younger MPs and MPs from the conservative CDU/CSU and liberal FDP produce more complex Instagram posts, whereas male MPs post slightly less complex content than their female counterparts. We highlight that MPs’ everyday Instagram use reflects deliberate communicative choices rather than uniform platform adoption. The Instagram Complexity Index offers a replicable tool for studying digital political behavior beyond and in campaign periods and contributes to research on platform-specific political communication practices.