Politicians from 12 countries rarely engage with researchers on social media, but this can change when expertise gains salience

Interactions between the policy and academic communities can play an important role in political decisionmaking. Still, the fact that much of the policymaking process happens behind closed doors obscures our understanding of the relationships between political decisionmakers with academic researchers. This paper analyzes online behavioral data from 3,670 lawmakers in 12 countries and integrates them to a novel database of 410K academic researchers on Twitter. The findings suggest that lawmakers do follow, yet rarely visibly engage with researchers online. Lawmakers from conservative and radical right parties follow and engage less with researchers online than their colleagues from other parties. While the base engagement is relatively low across legislatures, it can increase when expertise gains salience. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, marked by policy uncertainty involving a novel and technically complex policy issue, lawmakers' overall inclination to follow and engage with scholars increased, most prominently targeting researchers from the medical sciences. These findings have implications for our understanding of politicians’ strategic engagement with science production.