creator Hemphill, Libby creator Shapiro, Matthew A. creator Otterbacher, Jahna This paper uses data from 1,042 tweets posted by or mentioning Chicago Aldermen or Mayor Rahm Emanuel to examine how Chicago politicians use social media. Twitter provides a public communication medium in which constituents and their representatives can have two-way conversations that others can witness and record, and we used qualitative and social network methods to examine conversations between Chicagoans and representatives in city government. We coded the contents of each tweet over the two-week time period (e.g., official business, fundraising) and created representations of the social networks created by the users’ following behaviors. These networks indicate who receives politicians’ tweets and help identify the audiences for political messaging in social media. Our analysis indicates that Chicago’s Aldermen and Mayor use Twitter for social conversations more often than political ones, and that only a small number of Aldermen dominate the resulting conversation networks. Submitted by Libby Hemphill (lhemphil@iit.edu) on 2012-04-06T18:53:36Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Hemphill et al MPSA 2012 Aldermen.pdf: 282186 bytes, checksum: 8996a9affb5ba98e45ce4e1a98b20769 (MD5) Made available in DSpace on 2012-04-06T18:53:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Hemphill et al MPSA 2012 Aldermen.pdf: 282186 bytes, checksum: 8996a9affb5ba98e45ce4e1a98b20769 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-03-12 Social Network Research Group at IIT, IIT Graduate College 2012-03-12 2012-03-12

Manuscript

http://hdl.handle.net/10560/2699 political communication social media urban politics Technical report born digital application/pdf In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Open Access SSCI / Social Sciences Illinois Institute of Technology Affiliated department