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Tweet Acts: How Constituents Lobby Congress via Twitter
Title
Tweet Acts: How Constituents Lobby Congress via Twitter
Creator
Hemphill, Libby, Roback, Andrew
Date
2014, 2014
Description
Twitter is increasingly becoming a medium through which constituents can lobby their elected representatives in Congress about issues that...
Show moreTwitter is increasingly becoming a medium through which constituents can lobby their elected representatives in Congress about issues that matter to them. Past research has focused on how citizens communicate with each other or how members of Congress (MOCs) use social media in general; our research examines how citizens communicate with MOCs. We contribute to existing literature through the careful examination of hundreds of citizen-authored tweets and the development of a categorization scheme to describe common strategies of lobbying on Twitter. Our findings show that contrary to past research that assumed citizens used Twitter to merely shout out their opinions on issues, citizens utilize a variety of sophisticated techniques to impact political outcomes.
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What's Congress Doing on Twitter?
Title
What's Congress Doing on Twitter?
Creator
Hemphill, Libby, Otterbacher, Jahna, Shapiro, Matthew A.
Date
2013-10-23, 2012-10-23
Description
As Twitter becomes a more common means for officials to communicate with their constituents, it becomes more important that we understand how...
Show moreAs 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.
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Hashtag data from "Agenda Building & Indexing: Does the U.S. Congress Direct New York Times Content through Twitter?"
Title
Hashtag data from "Agenda Building & Indexing: Does the U.S. Congress Direct New York Times Content through Twitter?"
Creator
Hemphill, Libby
Date
2016, 2014
Description
From the paper: The conventional understanding of how elected officials affect the policy agenda is based in arguments that they use symbols...
Show moreFrom the paper: The conventional understanding of how elected officials affect the policy agenda is based in arguments that they use symbols and rhetoric to propagate the problem, and that this happens primarily through the traditional media. The arguments presented in this article are largely consistent with this but account for the function of social media. More specifically, and framed by indexing theory, we argue that social media enhances opportunities for policy agenda builders in the U.S. Congress to share information with journalists. Across the key policy issues of 2013, tests for congruence between politicians’ Twitter posts and New York Times articles confirm a connection, particularly for the policy issue areas of the economy, immigration, health care, and marginalized groups. Simultaneous discussion and debate between Democrats and Republicans about a particular policy issue area, however, negatively impacts how the New York Times indexes a particular issue.
Here we provide single Excel file of all the hashtags posted by members of Congress to Twitter during 2013. The file contains three columns: datetime, hashtag, and twitter_username. The datetime indicates when a tweet was posted. The hashtag indicates what hashtag a user posted at that time (tweets may contain multiple tags). Twitter_username is the Twitter handle of the account that posted a tweet with that hashtag at that time. We created a list of member of Congress Twitter accounts by looking up each member and checking with Govtrack.us and congress.gov information. Please cite our paper: Shapiro, M. A. and Hemphill, L. (in press) Agenda Building & Indexing: Does the U.S. Congress Direct New York Times Content through Twitter? Policy & Internet.
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Data from Tweet Acts: How Constituents Lobby Congress via Twitter
Title
Data from Tweet Acts: How Constituents Lobby Congress via Twitter
Creator
Hemphill, Libby, Roback, Andrew
Date
2013-09-19, 2012
Description
Sponsorship: Amazon Web Services Education Grants Program
Data presented in a CSCW 2014 paper titled Tweet Acts: How Constituents Lobby...
Show moreSponsorship: Amazon Web Services Education Grants Program
Data presented in a CSCW 2014 paper titled Tweet Acts: How Constituents Lobby Congress via Twitter. Libby Hemphill and Andrew J. Roback. 2014. Tweet acts: how constituents lobby congress via Twitter. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing (CSCW '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1200-1210. DOI=10.1145/2531602.2531735http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2531602.2531735
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