Measuring Partisanship and Representation in Online Congressional Communication

• In Event: Congressional Communication in the Social Media Age

Abstract

The rise of social media has created new ways for elected officials to communicate with their constituents, while at the same time enabling the diffusion of polarizing partisan rhetoric. How have members of Congress responded to these opportunities? In this paper, we analyze ten years' worth of Congressional tweets to answer these questions. Using computational text analysis tools, we classify each tweet according to the representational style (position taking, credit-claiming, negative partisan attacks, etc.) and the partisanship of the text (from far right to moderate to far left). After validating our classifications, we use the resulting measures to describe how Congressional social media usage has changed over this time period and evaluate the extent to which communication is strategically motivated by electoral concerns.

Authors

• Michael Kistner, University of Houston

• Robert Daniel Alvarez, University of Houston

• Maya Fitch, University of Houston

• Lucas James Lothamer, University of Houston

• Elizabeth N. Simas, Texas A&M University