1 How politicians use Twitter and does it matter? The case of Norwegian national politicians Bernard Enjolras Institute for Social research, Oslo Abstract The adoption by politicians of social media platforms as tools of political communication are expected to generate new forms of communication between politicians and their electorate and to provoke more dialogical forms of communication where politicians talk personally to their followers. This article investigates the extent to which Norwegian Politicians use Twitter interactively, whether direct iŶteraĐtioŶ iŶĐreases politiĐiaŶs’ iŶflueŶĐe oŶ Tǁitter aŶd ǁhether politiĐiaŶs iŶteraĐt ŵostly ǁithiŶ a limited elitist network or within a broader network of electorates. Twitter data on all national Norwegian politicians (members of Parliament and ministries) with a Twitter account were collected using the Twitter API. The data is constituted of all of the tweets tweeted by the 84 politicians since becoming active on Twitter, the metadata associated to these tweets, and some background information about the politicians. 45 298 tweets were collected and classified using a supervised text classifier algorithm into seven categories (narrating, positioning, directing information, requesting action, thanking, conversation, other). The ŵeŶtioŶs of other users iŶ eaĐh politiĐiaŶ’s tǁeet ǁere also collected. IŶteraĐtiǀe ĐoŶǀersatioŶ oŶ Tǁitter aĐĐouŶts for less thaŶ ϭϬ perĐeŶt of the politiĐiaŶs’ tweets. The relationship between interactive communication and measures of popularity (number of followers) and influence (number of generated retweets) on Twitter has been investigated. Popularity on Twitter is positively associated to political positions characterized by a rich-get-richer effect. Influence on Twitter is positively associated with both the degree of interactive usage and the level of