Congressional twitter use revisited on the platform's 10‐year anniversary

Golbeck, Jennifer; Auxier, Brooke E.; Bickford, Abigail; Cabrera, Lautaro; McHugh, Meaghan C.; Moore, S; Hart, Jacquelyn; Resti, Justin; Rogers, A. D.; Zimmerman, Jenna

doi:10.1002/asi.24022

Cited by 13 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Political parties are a mechanism to serve and facilitate electoral goals (Mayhew, 1974) and to maintain majority status (Aldrich, 1995). Prior work on Congressional tweets established that Republican and Democratic parties use Twitter for different communication activities (Golbeck et al, 2018; Hemphill et al, 2013; Russell, 2018), and we expect to see similar differentiation here. Another study of Twitter use in the U.K. Parliament found that the Labour Party members generated fragmented communication networks rather than a cohesive party (Adi, Erickson, & Lilleker, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 50%

“…This low-cost effort has the outsized potential to increase the interactions between elite and mass publics by publicly broadcasting their agenda and creating an accessible record of government action (Bruns and Highfield 2012). Twitter is a broadcasting device for politicians (Gainous and Wagner 2014;Golbeck et al 2018;Hemphill, Otterbacher, and Shapiro 2013), so being able to take advantage of its outreach capabilities is especially important to politicians and their staffers (Chi and Yang 2011). This public communication domain offers policymakers a relatively unfiltered credit claiming opportunity (Mayhew 1974) to highlight accomplishments and advertise a political brand.…”

Section: Tweeting Political Agendasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In a single day, a member of Congress can use Twitter to make multiple policy pronouncements that aim to garner media buzz. Twitter is a broadcasting device for politicians (Gainous & Wagner, 2014; Golbeck et al, 2018; Hemphill, Otterbacher, & Shapiro, 2013), experiencing a nearly 100 percent adoption rate in Congress (Evans, Habib, Litzen, Jose, & Ziegenbein, 2019; Golbeck et al, 2018; LaMarre & Suzuki‐Lambrecht, 2013). This public communication domain offers policymakers a relatively unfiltered credit claiming opportunity (Mayhew, 1974) to highlight accomplishments and advertise a political brand.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Particularly for those members with less political power or who are defined by their “outsider” status, lawmakers on Twitter have a venue to develop policy debates and connect with a digital audience (Borge Bravo & Esteve Del Valle, 2017; Evans et al, 2016). Combined with the publicity surrounding President Donald Trump's morning tweets, Twitter has become the social media platform of choice for most legislators (Evans et al, 2016; Golbeck et al, 2018). Twitter's open network—compared with Facebook's closed system, for example—facilitates a sharing of public information and openness among users that matches legislators’ desire to connect with as many constituents as possible.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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What Drives U.S. Congressional Members’ Policy Attention on Twitter?

Hemphill¹,

Russell²,

Schöpke‐Gonzalez³

2020

Policy & Internet

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Understanding how Members of Congress (MCs) distribute their political attention is key to a number of areas of political science research including agenda setting, framing, and issue evolution. Tweets illuminate what lawmakers are paying attention to by aggregating information from newsletters, press releases, and floor debates to provide a birds-eye view of a lawmaker's diverse agenda. In order to leverage this data efficiently, we trained a supervised machine learning classifier to label tweets according to the Comparative Agenda Project's Policy Codebook and used the results to examine the differential attention that policy topics receive from MCs. The classifier achieved an F1 score of 0.79 and a Cohen's kappa with human labelers of 0.78, suggesting good performance. Using this classifier, we labeled 1,485,834 original MC tweets (Retweets were excluded) and conducted a multinomial logistic regression to understand what influenced the policy areas MCs Tweeted about. Our model reveals differences in political attention along party, chamber, and gender lines and their interactions. Our approach allows us to study MCs' political attention in near real-time and to uncover both intra-and inter-group differences.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 50%

Section: Tweeting Political Agendasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

What Drives U.S. Congressional Members’ Policy Attention on Twitter?

Hemphill¹,

Russell²,

Schöpke‐Gonzalez³

2020

Policy & Internet

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“…Legislators across the globe are increasingly using social media to communicate with their constituents, other legislators, and the news media. For example, as of 2018, every member of Congress has an active Twitter account (Golbeck et al 2018). The majority of elected o cials at the national level in Europe and in the EU parliament similarly have Twitter accounts (Scherpereel, Wohlgemuth and Lievens 2018;Kat Devlin and Cha 2019), and the platform is also widely used by legislators in Latin America (Munger et al 2018), and Asia (Yoon and Park 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracking Legislators’ Expressed Policy Agendas in Real Time

Siegel¹,

Laitin²,

Lawrence³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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We develop a real-time scalable method to analyze strategic communication by political actors on salient policy issues through their tweets. Using word embeddings and supervised machine learning models, we classify legislators' tweets according to whether or not they reference policy issues as well as what positions they promote. This allows us to measure the microdynamics of elite communication with a high level of temporal granularity in a manner that is scalable across diverse issue areas and legislatures. As a proof of concept, here we use this method to track the multi-year evolution of positions that members of Congress express on immigration and climate change. Validation with issue-specific vote scores suggests that our method performs with a satisfactory level of accuracy and enables us to identify legislators whose online rhetoric differs substantively from their voting behavior. We also display the immigration analysis on an automatically updated publicly available interactive website, enabling researchers, journalists, and policy makers alike to explore legislators' shifting rhetoric on immigration in real time.

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