Doing What I Say: Connecting Congressional Social Media Behavior and Congressional Voting (original) (raw)

Relationships Among Twitter Conversation Networks, Language Use, and Congressional Voting

2012

As Twitter becomes a more common means for officials to communicate with their constituents, it becomes more important that we understand just how that communication relates to other political activities. Using data from 411 members of Congress' Twitter activity during the summer of 2011, we examine relationships among the resulting conversation networks, language use, and political behavior. The social networks that result from their communications have surprisingly low density and high diameter, indicating a level of independence that is surprising for a group so tightly connected offline. Our findings also indicate that officials frequently use Twitter to advertise their political positions and to provide information but rarely to request political action from their constituents or to recognize the good work of others. Our analysis suggests strong relationships between anti-social behaviors indicated by the loosely connected network and low incidence of pro-social conversations and polarized or extreme Congressional voting records.

A permanent campaign? Tweeting differences among members of Congress between campaign and routine periods

Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 2019

This article investigates whether the notion of a "permanent campaign" characterizes politicians' Twitter use by analyzing 285,456 tweets by Members of Congress during and after the 2016 US elections. We distinguished a campaign period, a lame duck period, and a routine period. The inclusion of a lame duck period is novel in studies on social networking sites and allows for more precise conclusions. In the routine period, politicians focused more on hard news, put more emphasis on domestic than foreign content on the country level, had a higher level of negative sentiment and published more tweets, whereas in the campaign period positive sentiment was higher. Additionally, we found large differences in politicians' tweeting behavior between the lame duck and routine period. We conclude that the notion of a 'permanent campaign' does not appropriately describe political campaigning on Twitter, but that the exact differences are still poorly understood, as empirical findings do not align well with previous literature.

Who benefits from Twitter? Social media and political competition in the U.S. House of Representatives

Many researchers have assumed that social media will reduce inequalities between elite politicians and those outside the political mainstream and that it will thus benefit democracy, as it circumvents the traditional media that focus too much on a few elite politicians. I test this assumption by investigating the association between U.S. Representatives using Twitter and their fundraising. Evidence suggests that (1) politicians' adoptions of social media have yielded increased donations from outside their constituencies but little from within their own constituencies; (2) politicians with extreme ideologies tend to benefit more from their social media adoptions; and (3) the political use of social media may yield a more unequal distribution of financial resources among candidates. Finally, I discuss the implications of these findings for political equality, polarization, and democracy.

Political leaders in (inter)action. Twitter as a strategic communication tool in electoral campaigns

The use of social networks, particularly Twitter, in the area of political communication is continually growing. Its capacity to foster direct and personal communication and interaction with the citizenry are two of the factors that explain its growth. The objective of this study is to analyse whether the principal Spanish political leaders (Mariano Rajoy, Pedro Sánchez, Pablo Iglesias, and Albert Rivera) dialogue and interact with the citizenry on Twitter. To that end, a quantitative content analysis is applied, taking as a reference the methodology of Kent and Taylor (1998) and its adaptation to Twitter by Ribalko and Seltzer (2010). The sample is composed of tweets published by the four candidates during the campaign for the general elections held in Spain on 20 December 2015. The results reveal that independent of variables such as number of publications, profile followers, or ideology, none of the political leaders use Twitter to dialogue with their audience. Meanwhile, it is also shown that the use of this platform drives the hybridisation of political actors’ communicative strategies.

Tweeting vertically? Elected officials' interactions with citizens on Twitter

2012

Enthusiasts propose that social media promotes vertical political communication, giving citizens the opportunity to interact directly with their representatives. However, skeptics claim that politicians avoid direct engagement with constituents, using technology to present a façade of interactivity instead. This study explores if and how elected officials in three regions of the world are using Twitter to interact with the public. We examine the Twitter activity of 15 officials over a period of six months. We show that in addition to the structural features of Twitter that are designed to promote interaction, officials rely on language to foster or to avoid engagement. It also provides yet more evidence that the existence of interactive features does not guarantee interactivity.

Tweeting on Presidential Coattails: Congressional Candidate Use of Twitter in the 2020 Elections

Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media

There is a long history of political science research focused on congressional candidates riding presidential coattails into office. The underlying theory for this potential relationship is relatively simple—when presidential nominees are popular, they can help bolster the electoral fortunes of their down-ballot, co-partisan candidates. If this is right, congressional candidates should be incentivized to publicly align themselves with their co-partisan presidential nominee, albeit in strategic ways. We look for this relationship by constructing an original dataset of congressional candidate Twitter data and identifying the extent to which candidates mention presidential nominees during the 2020 campaign, a behavior we call “tweeting on coattails.” Our data allow us to describe relationships between “tweeting on coattails”, candidate party ID, and district-level electoral conditions. We find that overall, challengers tweeted more than incumbents, but incumbents were more likely to “t...

Tweets and Posts: Social Networking Sites and Political Knowledge in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

2018

To what extent does a political candidate's social media presence influence people's views and their real-world political activities? We conducted a survey using Mechanical Turk asking questions about social networking use and political involvement with regard to the 2016 presidential election. We asked factual questions about politics to gauge political knowledge. We find low-information voters are more easily influenced by friends' posts and are more likely to be influenced by candidates' social media to change real-world political activities; in contrast, high-information voters are less easily influenced by friends' posts and less likely to be influenced by what candidates post.

Mapping the Political Twitterverse: Candidates and Their Followers in the Midterms

Fifth International AAAI …, 2011

Twitter provides a new and important tool for political actors. In the 2010 midterm elections, the vast majority of candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives and virtually all candidates for U.S. Senate and governorships used Twitter to reach out to potential supporters, direct them to particular pieces of information, request campaign contributions from them, and mobilize their political action. Despite the level of activity, we have little understanding of what the political Twitterverse looks like in terms of communication and discourse. This project seeks to remedy that lack of understanding by mapping candidates and their followers according to their use of hashtags (keywords) and user mentions (direct mentioning of other Twitter users). We have a unique data set constructed from tweets of most of the candidates running for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010, all the candidates for the Senate and governorships, and a random sample of their followers. From this we utilize multidimensional scaling to construct a visual map based on hashtag and user mention usage. We find that our data have both local and global interpretations that reflect both political leaning and strategies of communication. This study provides insight into innovation in new media usage in political behavior in particular and a bounded topic space in general.

Mapping the Political Twitterverse: Finding Connections Between Political Elites

2011

Twitter provides a new and important tool for political actors, and is increasingly being used as such. In the 2010 midterm elections, the vast majority of candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives and virtually all candidates for U.S. Senate and governorships used Twitter to reach out to potential supporters, direct them to particular pieces of information, request campaign contributions, and mobilize their political action. Despite the level of activity, we have little understanding of what the political Twitterverse looks like in terms of communication and discourse. This project seeks to remedy that lack of understanding by mapping candidates for federal office in 2010 and their followers, according to their use of the 4016 most used hashtags (keywords). Our data set is uniquely constructed from tweets of most of the candidates running for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010, all the candidates for the Senate and governorships, and a random sample of their followers. From this we utilize multidimensional scaling to construct a visual map based on hashtag usage. We find that our data have both local and global interpretations that reflect not only political leaning but also strategies of communication. This study provides insight into innovation in new media usage in political behavior, as well as a snapshot of the political twitterverse in 2010.

Negativity in a Twitter Age: How Politicians are Adapting to Social Media

This study investigates negative campaigning and issue preferences as reflected in the use of Twitter posts released during the 2011-2012 presidential primaries. Negative political campaigning and policy-centered voting have become more prevalent in recent years, especially with the advent of the Internet and the subsequent increase in media sources such as blogs and social media platforms. Because voters use the Internet more than ever, it is important to study the types of material candidates disseminate to the public and the degree of negativity included in such content. Findings indicate that runner-up candidates were not more likely to use negativity in tweets in our sample.