Gerenciamento de impressão e divulgação de informações financeiras em mídias sociais por entes públicos brasileiros

Abstract

The research addressed the connection between social media posts with themes related to public finances by Brazilian subnational governments and the financial performance achieved. The theoretical basis came from the lens of public choice theory, considering that the political motivation of reelection leads to the use of information regarding positive results as a strategy of impression management, with the goal of conveying the image of management efficiency to stakeholders. Data referring to the Twitter accounts of 151 entities, involving states, the federal district and municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, covering the period from 2016 to 2021, were analyzed. The identification of posts with content related to government finances relied on the use of keywords representative of the theme, using text pre-processing techniques. A low proportion of financial disclosures on social media was verified by the sample. The Poisson and Negative Binomial regression tests relating variables representing the government's financial situation, derived from previous studies and fiscal legislation, to the volume of use of the theme in the entities' publications on Twitter, indicated that the current budget execution, personnel expenses and the investments had effects on the phenomenon. Additionally, correlations were found related to the size of the population, the type of entity, political competition, income, education, age group, time of existence of the account and the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the use of visual resources is often seen as an impression management resource in the context of financial disclosures and as a significant tool in a greater engagement of the audience on social media, a greater extent of their use was not verified in cases where there are better indicators relating to the administration of public coffers. Considering that few studies address the use of information related to accounting in governmental social media, the research contributes to the literature in the area and highlights the need to disseminate knowledge to foster transparency and participation of civil society.