  How similar are politicians to those who vote for them? This is a critical
question at the heart of democratic representation and particularly relevant at
times when political dissatisfaction and populism are on the rise. To answer
this question we compare the online discourse of elected politicians and their
constituents. We collect a two and a half years (September 2020 - February
2023) constituency-level dataset for USA and UK that includes: (i) the Twitter
timelines (5.6 Million tweets) of elected political representatives (595 UK
Members of Parliament and 433 USA Representatives), (ii) the Nextdoor posts
(21.8 Million posts) of the constituency (98.4% USA and 91.5% UK
constituencies). We find that elected politicians tend to be equally similar to
their constituents in terms of content and style regardless of whether a
constituency elects a right or left-wing politician. The size of the electoral
victory and the level of income of a constituency shows a nuanced picture. The
narrower the electoral victory, the more similar the style and the more
dissimilar the content is. The lower the income of a constituency, the more
similar the content is. In terms of style, poorer constituencies tend to have a
more similar sentiment and more dissimilar psychological text traits (i.e.
measured with LIWC categories).
