A Network Analysis of Twitter Interactions by Members of the U.S. Congress

Abstract

Usage of Twitter by politicians has become more prevalent in recent years, with a goal of influencing the electorate and public perception. We collect, explore, and analyze over 12 years of public Twitter interactions of U.S. senators and representatives. Using community detection algorithms on these interaction networks, and without considering the content of the tweets, we are able to infer the political affiliation of each member of Congress with up to 98.8% accuracy in the House and 94.1% accuracy in the Senate. In addition, we define two metrics that can determine the political ideology of members of Congress achieving a very high Spearman’s rank correlation of 0.86 with the existing DW-NOMINATE score from the field of political science. Finally, we expand our structural analysis to intra-party factions and found evidence that some factions act on Twitter more cohesively than others, suggesting an increasing risk of an echo chamber effect when promoting their political agenda.

Investigating political polarization in India through the lens of Twitter

“…( 2021 ); Chamberlain et al. ( 2021 ) that suggest the mention networks to be reflective of cross-party interactions. One possible reason for this could be the nature of different interaction networks of Twitter.…”

Mask-Wearing as a Partisan Issue: Social Identity and Communication of Party Norms on Social Media Among Political Elites

“…The technological affordance of social media offers politicians abundant opportunities to express their social identities and popularize party norms (Buccoliero et al, 2020). In addition, the highly homophilous nature of interactions among MoC on social media (Chamberlain et al, 2021) can make politicians highly cognizant of party identity and further encourage them to align their attitudes with the party (García-Sánchez et al, 2021). For these reasons, we propose the following hypothesis: H1: Democratic congressional members are more likely to promote mask-wearing than Republican congressional members on Twitter.…”

“…Heere et al (2011), for example, found that interactions between individual members strongly influenced their perception of group-belonging, the formation of social identity, and support for associated organizations. In political settings, research has shown that politicians are more likely to co-sponsor a bill with in-group members (Neal, 2020) and interact with in-group members on social media (Chamberlain et al, 2021).…”

Who Did Spanish Politicians Start Following on Twitter? Homophilic Tendencies among the Political Elite

“…"Twitter is the de facto social media platform for discussing politics online" (Chamberlain et al 2021). Twitter has been described as a political tool (Pérez-Curiel and Limón Naharro 2019; Redek and Godnov 2018) and as a political network (Conway and Wang 2015;Fernández Gómez et al 2018) as it represents a significant role in political communication campaigns (Alonso-Muñoz et al 2016;Usher 2018).…”

“…Twitter research on echo chambers has focused on interactions and content exposure, and the methods can vary, using digital trace data and self-reported data (Terren and Borge 2021). Political communication has been approached in Twitter studies in different research areas such as the use of the platform in determined events, its use by the public, and the use that political parties and politicians make of the microblogging network (Chamberlain et al 2021;Jungherr 2016).…”