Some insights into the role of social media in political communication

Political communication in the social media network of Twitter has enjoyed a popularity increase in recent years. This also meant that the microblogging platform Twitter is now used in different countries for political campaigns as well as political discussions. For this study we collected data from more than 1,400 politicians in three countries Australia, Germany and the U.S. through the Twitter API. This data set with nearly one million tweets is the basis for our analyses, where we compare the behavior of the politicians on Twitter regarding differences and similarities in the political context. Amongst others we compare key figures concerning the year of joining, age groups, gender, user activity, and trend topics in the named parliaments. Thus we gain insight into the political communication on Twitter in the mentioned countrie