Waldemar Rydzak

Department of Information Economics,

Poznań University of Economics and Business,

Poland

waldemar.rydzak@ue.poznan.pl

ORCID 0000-0001-5771-933X

Municipal budget communication on social media: Seasonality, electoral cycles, and development-oriented framing in Poland

Małgorzata Magdalena Hybka

Department of Public Finance,

Poznań University of Economics and Business, 

Poland

malgorzata.hybka@ue.poznan.pl 

ORCID 0000-0002-3524-3489

Jacek Trębecki

Department of Information Economics, 

Poznań University of Economics and Business,

Poland

jacek.trebecki@ue.poznan.pl

ORCID 0000-0001-9775-173X

Krzysztof Hwaszcz

Department of English and Comparative Linguistics, 

Institute of English Studies, Faculty of Neophilology, 

University of Wrocław, Poland

krzysztof.hwaszcz@uwr.edu.pl

ORCID 0000-0003-2136-5001

Tomasz Walkowiak

Department of Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Information and Communication Technology, 

Wrocław University of Science and Technology,

Poland

tomasz.walkowiak@pwr.edu.pl

ORCID 0000-0002-7749-4251

Abstract. The municipal budget is an important instrument of public management, accountability, and the legitimacy of local government actions. The aim of the article is to examine the intensity, seasonality, and framing of budget content communication by municipalities in social media, taking into account variation by municipality type and region, as well as the distinct role of the electoral cycle. The analysis focuses on Poland and is based on a corpus of 1,131,615 posts published on the official Facebook profiles of 766 municipalities from six Polish voivodeships between January 2, 2011, and April 19, 2024. Budget posts were identified using a lexical method exclusively among entries containing text. Descriptive analyses, logistic regression (logit) for the probability of publishing a budget post, linear regression (OLS) for the share of fiscal vocabulary at the municipality × month level, sensitivity analysis, and comparisons of peri-election windows were applied. The results indicate a clear seasonality of budget communication and a significant impact of the electoral cycle: during campaign periods, the share of budget posts increases, and framing shifts toward an investment-project narrative. The most stable result is the seasonal reframing of the budget toward developmental content, while differences between municipality types in the level of message fiscality turn out to be sensitive to the adopted lexical classification. The article shows that the budget in social media functions not only as financial information but also as a narrative resource used to inform residents, legitimize local authorities’ actions, and communicate development effects.

Received: May, 2025

1st Revision: April, 2026

Accepted: May, 2026

DOI: 10.14254/2071-8330.2026/19-2/13

JEL Classification: H72, H83, D72, D83, R58

Keywords: municipal budget, social media, budget communication, electoral cycle, Poland