New analysis examines how legislators set agendas on social media. Researchers analyzed fine-grained temporal patterns in tweets sent by members of Congress and citizens during the 113th U.S. Congress.
Data & Methods: Twitter messages were classified into topics using unsupervised methods, then vector autoregression models assessed issue prediction dynamics between public and politicians.
Key Findings: Legislators follow, rather than lead, public discussions online; this holds despite media influence. However, they show greater responsiveness to their supporters compared to the general public.
Real-World Significance: The findings suggest social media data can help clarify political agenda-setting processes beyond traditional metrics.
| Who Leads? Who Follows? Measuring Issue Attention and Agenda Setting by Legislators and the Mass Public Using Social Media Data was authored by Pablo Barbera, Andreu Casas, Jonathan Nagler, Patrick J. Egan, Richard Bonneau, John T. Jost and Joshua A. Tucker. It was published by Cambridge in APSR in 2019. |
