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Social Politics: Agenda Setting and Political Communication on Social Media

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Social Informatics (SocInfo 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10046))

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Abstract

Social media play an increasingly important role in political communication. Various studies investigated how individuals adopt social media for political discussion, to share their views about politics and policy, or to mobilize and protest against social issues. Yet, little attention has been devoted to the main actors of political discussions: the politicians. In this paper, we explore the topics of discussion of U.S. President Obama and the 50 U.S. State Governors using Twitter data and agenda-setting theory as a tool to describe the patterns of daily political discussion, uncovering the main topics of attention and interest of these actors. We examine over one hundred thousand tweets produced by these politicians and identify seven macro-topics of conversation, finding that Twitter represents a particularly appealing vehicle of conversation for American opposition politicians. We highlight the main motifs of political conversation of the two parties, discovering that Republican and Democrat Governors are more or less similarly active on Twitter but exhibit different styles of communication. Finally, by reconstructing the networks of occurrences of Governors’ hashtags and keywords related to political issues, we observe that Republicans and Democrats form two tight yet polarized cores, with a strongly different shared agenda on many issues of discussion.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    At least with respect to other platforms like Facebook where ties are mostly formed based on pre-existing offline connections [16].

  2. 2.

    Twitter official data: https://about.twitter.com/company.

  3. 3.

    Twitter official blog: https://blog.twitter.com/2014/what-fuels-a-tweets-engagement.

  4. 4.

    White House: State and Local Government, 2015 https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/state-and-local-government.

  5. 5.

    Given the massive size of the dataset, with over one hundred thousand tweets, this procedure required three annotators and countless hours of work.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

    Xinxin Yang, Bo-Chiuan Chen & Mrinmoy Maity

  2. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA

    Emilio Ferrara

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  1. Xinxin Yang
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  4. Emilio Ferrara
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Correspondence to Emilio Ferrara .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Emma Spiro

  2. Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

    Yong-Yeol Ahn

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Yang, X., Chen, BC., Maity, M., Ferrara, E. (2016). Social Politics: Agenda Setting and Political Communication on Social Media. In: Spiro, E., Ahn, YY. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10046. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47880-7_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47880-7_20

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