Racial and Gender Biases in State Legislators Twitter Endorsement Networks

• In Event: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Elections

Abstract

Endorsements contribute to electoral success both in gaining a seat in office and legislative success once in office. This is because endorsements can serve as a heuristic that 1) establishes credibility of candidates to voters, 2) mobilizes voters and 3) increase campaign funding. And for candidates for local office, who ostensibly do not have an extensive political resume to precede them, an endorsement from an existing legislator with an established political career is an important campaign resource. But how do legislators decided to distribute this resource? And how does identity play a role in allocating endorsements? To explore these questions further I analyze the network of Twitter endorsements of state legislators and the racial and gender biases within these networks. Are legislators of color more likely to endorse candidates of color? Similarly, are women legislators more likely to endorse women legislators? My project contributes to the extant literature by revealing how endorsements flow between state elected officials and uncovering any biases in these flows. This research allows us to understand how elites shape descriptive representation in state political office. In a preliminary analysis of ten states in which mentioning a candidate is counted as an endorsement, presence of gender ties or race ties do not significantly explain the endorsement ties on Twitter. However, I have expanded the dataset to include legislator tweets from all fifty states and utilize a machine learning classifier to filter exclusively endorsement related tweets. Therefore, by extending the scope and specificity of the data there is still precedent to further explore endorsement networks amongst public officials on Twitter. Another goal of this paper is to report descriptive statistics summarizing the rate of online endorsements of state legislative candidates. This will illuminate how often candidates are endorsed and how many followers each of these endorsements reaches.

Author

• Nitheesha Nakka