What's Congress Doing on Twitter?

As Twitter becomes a more common means for officials to communicate with their constituents, it becomes more important that we understand how officials use these communication tools. Using data from 380 members of Congress’ Twitter activity during the winter of 2012, we find that officials frequently use Twitter to advertise their political positions and to provide information but rarely to request political action from their constituents or to recognize the good work of others. We highlight a number of differences in communication frequency between men and women, Senators and Representatives, Republicans and Democrats. We provide groundwork for future research examining the behavior of public officials online and testing the predictive power of officials’ social media behavior

Mature and Internet Enabled Communication Technologies: Insights into the Impact of Gender on Legislator Communications

This United States wide survey, sent to all 7,3831 state legislators, examines how state legislator gender impacts the frequency of use and importance of communication technologies (CTs)commonly used by state legislators. The study compares the frequency of use and importance of evolutionarily mature CTs such as face-to-face meetings, handwritten letters, and phone conversations and Internet enabled CTs (IECTs) such as E-Mail, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,web pages, Blogs, and text messaging. The study uncovers evidence that: 1) Female legislators both use and more highly value Internet enabled communication technologies more than male legislators, 2) Female legislators communicate more frequently with other legislators via E-Mail,Twitter, Facebook, web pages, blogs, and text messaging than male legislators, 3) Female legislators communicate more frequently with their constituents via hard-copy letters, E-Mail,Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, text messaging, and press releases than male legislators. With respect to CT importance, we find that: 1) Male legislators find face-to-face communications more important when communicating with peers and the telephone more important when communicating with constituents than do female legislators while 2) Female legislators find E-Mail, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and text messaging more important when communicating with peers than male legislators and hard-copy letters E-Mail, Twitter, and Facebook more important when communicating with constituents than male legislators. Our research shows support that the concept of tokenism is reflected in how female legislators communicate

Agenda detector: labeling tweets with political policy agenda

In nearly one decade of Twitter’s being it has witnessed an ever growing user base from various realms of the world, one of them being politics. In the political domain, Twitter is used as a vital tool for communication purposes, running effective e-campaigns, and mining and affecting public opinions to name a few. We study the problem of automatically detecting whether a tweet posted by a state’s Senate’s twitter handle in the US has a reference to policy agenda(s). Such a capability can help detect the policy agendas that a state focuses on and also capture the inception of ideas leading to framing of bill/law. Furthermore, analyzing the spatial and temporal dynamics of tweets carrying policy agendas can facilitate study of policy diffusion among states, and help in comprehending the changing aspects of states learning policy-making from each other. Currently, no study has been carried out that analyzes Twitter data to detect whether or not a tweet refers to a policy agenda. We present our analysis on 122,965 tweets collected from verified Twitter handles of the US state’s upper house – Senate. We present our high-level analysis on (a) how much Twitter has penetrated into state politics and (b) how states use the medium differently in terms of the messages they broadcast. Our proposed approach aims to automate classification of a tweet based on having a reference to policy agenda (Has Agenda) or not (No Agenda). We accomplish this by leveraging existing text classification methodology and achieve a recall of 89.1% and precision of 77.2% for the “Has Agenda” class. We investigate several machine learning algorithms to determine the best performing one for our binary classification problem. We conclude that support vector machine using linear kernel was the most efficient algorithm to use for our dataset. Lastly, we propose a set of hand-crafted features that together with feature selection and stemming improved our classifier’s performance. Prior to including these features the classifier was developed using, basic preprocessing techniques, and term occurrence (for feature extraction). An overall improvement of 5.187 % at a significance level of α=0.05 was achieved

The Tweet Delete of Congress: Congress and Deleted Posts on Twitter

Since 2006, increasingly more politicians have joined , and are active on, social media networks, in order to reach out to constituents. However, politicians, such as Anthony Weiner, have started to find themselves in the middle of Twitter scandals and criticism, since their posts are openly available to the public. These ramifications may be leading politicians to delete their tweets, but thanks to the Sunlight Foundation and its website Politwoops, deleted tweets by politicians are now archived and ripe for political research. This raises the question Which members of Congress are deleting tweets and why? Thus, I conduct the first known qualitative study on Congress and deleted tweets, to determine what members may be trying to delete. An empirical analysis on raw data, including 500 deleted tweets by Congress members, was used to discover which posts, and by which members, are deleted more often. I hypothesize that Congress members, specifically Republican Senators, are more likely to delete negative tweets, such as posts that are unprofessional, against their constituents\u27 views, or contain controversial issues, in order to ensure public support and avoid backlash

Eleições Parlamentares no Brasil: O Uso do Twitter na Busca por Votos

Desde o uso das novas tecnologias nas eleições americanas de 2008, o Twitter tem se tornado uma plataforma para as atividades políticas, criando um canal para a interação entre políticos e eleitores. A comunicação política com o uso de mídia social é parte das atividades congressistas nos dias atuais. Além disto, o Twitter se constitui como importante meio para o ganho de popularidade com fins eleitorais. A questão de pesquisa que norteia este artigo é verificar como o comportamento dos parlamentares influencia o uso do Twitter na busca por votos nas eleições ao Congresso Nacional. Assim, o objetivo deste trabalho é analisar os diferentes comportamentos dos políticos brasileiros no ambiente virtual antes, durante e após as eleições parlamentares de 2014. Foram coletadas informações da plataforma do Twitter em quatro momentos, entre dezembro de 2013 e abril de 2015. Os políticos foram comparados segundo suas aspirações eleitorais e conforme as diferentes apropriações da rede social. Os dados indicam que políticos em campanha eleitoral fazem maior e mais frequente uso das novas tecnologias, no sentido de construírem uma imagem política dentro do contexto eleitoral. Como resultado, esses políticos obtiveram maior atenção dos usuários do Twitter, o que está diretamente relacionado a um maior número de votos obtidos no pleito eleitoral

The Quality of Political Deliberation on Twitter

This thesis explores how Twitter users discuss political issues in Saudi Arabia and how social and religious values impact on the quality of deliberation. Its three case studies are: women’s political participation; the housing shortage in Saudi Arabia; and unlawful use of public property. Based on the analyses of 12,093 tweets and 27 interviews with Twitter users in Saudi Arabia, this thesis argues that public debate is rational, respectful, focused and diverse. Both men and women participate in and exchange a range of attitudes towards government decisions. There is evidence to suggest that Twitter users criticise and challenge officials, clerics and established social values. Based on these findings, this thesis suggests that public deliberation about sensitive issues in Saudi society corresponds with key elements of public deliberation as it is envisioned in Western theories of citizen engagement in the public sphere. Some Twitter users perceive this kind of participation as an act of good citizenship. The analysis of tweets and interviews in this study demonstrate Twitter users’ sense of connectedness towards their society and fellow citizens. On the other hand, the results also confirmed that the quality of political deliberation is impacted on by government censorship, Twitter users’ self-censorship and social and religious values

Democracy and social policies for inequality reduction in Brazil : representatives policies' congruence and relevance – 1998-2018

Tese (doutorado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Ciência Política, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência Política, 2019.A capacidade das democracias de reduzirem desigualdades ainda é uma questão aberta. O Brasil oferece um caso de estudo, como um país em que os indicadores socioeconômicos avançaram significativamente para aqueles que estão na base da pirâmide social após a redemocratização. No entanto, o contexto atual traz questões sobre a sustentabilidade da democracia brasileira para efetivamente implementar políticas redistributivas a longo prazo. A extensão em que nosso sistema político é capaz de responder a demandas redistributivas ainda precisa ser testada, e este trabalho procura avançar nesse campo. A questão central desta pesquisa é 'até que ponto os deputados federais brasileiros respondem aos seus eleitores nas demandas de saúde e educação?'. A resposta a essa pergunta é buscada nos estudos de "congruência" política, localizado em um campo mais amplo de estudos de representação política. Considera-se os deputados federais brasileiros individualmente em cinco legislaturas (51a à 55a, abrangendo 1998 a 2018). Calcula-se sua dependência eleitoral de populações não assistidas – medida por meio da ponderação de indicadores socioeconômicos de saúde, educação e renda nos votos em nível municipal – e depois comparando-os ao peso da produção legislativa proativa em saúde e educação nas propostas legislativas proativas para cada representante. Adotou-se um modelo de distribuição beta inflacionada para se medir a correlação de tais proporções. Além disso, analisou-se as propostas aprovadas sobre as 5 legislaturas e suas características por proponente. Os resultados apontam para uma congruência significativa de políticas relacionadas à educação e dependência de votos de municípios com altos índices de analfabetismo, frequência escolar, pobreza e baixas taxas de mortalidade infantil. Esse alinhamento não foi encontrado nas políticas de saúde, que responderam mais à profissão declarada do deputado federal do que às características socioeconômicas dos seus eleitores. A capacidade de resposta diminuiu ao longo do tempo, enquanto a Câmara Federal viu uma mudança progressiva em sua base eleitoral – que tem melhor saúde, maior instrução, menos pobreza e desigualdade – e, gradualmente, mais deputados têm apresentado propostas de educação e saúde. A entrega final da política pública por deputados federais, por outro lado, foi limitada a regras e direitos, não afetando expansão orçamentária, e prioritariamente dispersando benefícios. Isso corrobora estudos prévios de cunho similar.A long-standing question on the capacity of democracies to reduce inequalities is yet open. Brazil offers a case of study, as a country where socio-economic indicators have significantly advanced for those at the bottom of the social pyramid after the re-democratization. Nevertheless, the current context brings questions on the sustainability of Brazilian democracy to deliver redistributive policies in the long run. The extent to which our political system is capable of responding to redistributive demands is still to be tested, and this work seeks to advance this field. The central question of this research is, 'how responsive are Brazilian Representatives to their constituencies on health and education demands?'. The answer to such a question is sought in the studies of political 'congruence,' under a broader field of political representation studies. It considers individual Brazilian Representatives across 5 Legislatures (51st to 55th, covering 1998 to 2018). It calculates their electoral dependence on unattended populations – measured through weighting socio-economic indicators on health, education, and income on votes at a municipality level – and then comparing it to the weight of proactive legislative production on health and education on the total proactive legislative proposals for each Representative. It adopted a model of beta inflated distribution to measure the correlation of such proportions. It further analyzed the approved proposals over the 5 Legislatures and their characteristics by the proponent. The results point to a significant congruence of education-related policies and dependence on votes from municipalities with high rates of illiteracy, school attendance, poverty, and low rates of infant mortality. I did not find such alignment for health policies, which responded more to the Representative's declared profession than its constituencies' socio-economic characteristics. Responsiveness has decreased over time, while the House saw a progressive change in their aggregated constituencies – which have better health, are more educated, less poor and unequal – and gradually more Representatives have been presenting education and health proposals. Representatives' policy delivery, on the other hand, has been limited to rules and rights, not affecting budgetary expansion overtime, and very much focused on diffusing benefits rather than concentrating them. This corroborates other previous similar studies

Examining social networking site narratives between government and youth on entrepreneurship : the case of relationship development in Egypt

Analysis of the ways in which SNS (Social Networking Sites) are used by governments, organisations and everyday users has over the past ten years been of significant interest to academic researchers. Part of this analysis of use has included understanding how in the Middle East, SNS were used in the series of anti-government protests known as the Arab Spring. Specifically, in Egypt, during the January 25 Revolution, a large number of youth users went on SNS such as Facebook to disseminate information, create conversations and raise awareness of their perspectives and concerns. Whilst use in protest and demonstration may result in aspects such as a drop in public trust of government agents, SNS could also contribute to significant relational outcomes such as relationship development and trust.This study takes Egypt as its foci in investigating the outcomes of SNS interaction between Government agencies and Youth users. This study aims to understand the role of the topic about which conversations are occurring in communicating with the citizens. Additionally, this study places emphasis on the role of the government agency in changing the perceptions of the Government through SNS interactions.This study contributes to the burgeoning domain of SNS studies by providing a non- traditional approach to its theoretical background. It specifically achieves this by adopting three areas of focus; first, SNS which includes a site and user perspective. Second, the political context which includes Marketing theory and government studies. Third, relationship development and trust which includes a multi theory lens into theorising the outcomes of SNS interactions. Therefore, it is the first study to apply Political Marketing Theory in Egypt in a non-electoral context. Using novel applications of Relationship Marketing and Public Relations theory, this study presents an understanding of the relationship orientation in the interaction between GOFE and Youth on SNS. Furthermore, the analysis regarding trust development in this study is developed through a framework that highlights both the users’ perspective of trust and the organisations' efforts towards achieving trust.This study adopts a social constructivist approach. Therefore, this investigation embraces qualitative inductive methods. Due to the rich culture and high interaction of the context investigated, the research problem at hand was addressed through the application of netnography. The Netnographic package includes; firstly, an online observation of Facebook pages followed by textual analysis. Secondly, it includes two sets of interviews with a sample of the users (i.e. Youth) and the organisations (i.e. GOFE). Using Thematic Analysis ten different themes were extracted from the three sources of data (i.e. Facebook data, GOFE interviews and Youth interviews).The findings from this study suggest that GOFE SNS representation is not yet mature. However, findings demonstrate that GOFE are in the process of becoming a generalisable model of government SNS representation. This could occur with the drop in control over engagement and movement to engagement strategies beyond those targeted primarily at publicity alone. Indeed, this study confirms the significant influence of SNS in fostering positive relational outcomes between the Government and Youth, while confirming the role of the topic and agency. These findings are discussed in light of theoretical contribution and practical implication to the government sector. Whereas previous studies have focused on one aspect of the communication process, this study is the first conducted in the public sector domain in Egypt that focuses on the observed behaviours of GOFE on SNS, perceived behaviours of GOFE by Youth and the strategic intent of GOFE by being present on SNS. This study concludes with limitations incurred and recommendations for practice and future studies. Finally, this study argues that with a further optimised SNS representation, there is indeed hope in developing relationships and achieving trust between Government and citizens in Egypt through SNS interaction

The battle for Britain: MPs’ use of Facebook during the EU referendum campaign

This is the age of the permanent campaign and professionalised political communication. Politicians must deliver and perform on a day-to-day basis. This includes UK members of Parliament. Notorious for taking their time in adopting digital means of communicating with their constituencies, especially in the 2000s, the majority can now be found both offline and online. This thesis presents an investigation into the online communication of politicians on Facebook about the EU referendum. The referendum provides a clear-cut context with two opposing camps in which differences and similarities in communication and campaigning between MPs, if any, come to light. This thesis consists of 6 chapters. In Chapter 1, I introduce this research, and in Chapter 2, I outline the method used for analysing and collecting the data, which is unique to this project. I thereafter present three empirical papers in Chapters 3-5. These papers each revolve around the study of MP communication at the time of the EU referendum campaign, using a novel data set of MP Facebook posts, published between February 19 and June 23, 2016. In the first empirical chapter (Chapter 3), I examine the active involvement of MPs in the EU referendum, on the Facebook platform, considering MP characteristics and using the corpus of relevant posts. Thereafter, in Chapter 4, I study how MPs communicate in these relevant posts, focusing on their use of emotion and argument. This is followed by the last empirical paper, in which I use time series analysis to investigate the dynamics of the EU referendum campaign of MPs on Facebook, to gain an understanding of the patterns in the prominence of campaign communication on this platform (Chapter 5). In the final chapter of this thesis, Chapter 6, I provide a conclusion