Communicating in 140 Characters or Less: Congressional Adoption of Twitter in the 111th Congress

Straus, Jacob R.; Glassman, Matthew; Shogan, Colleen J.; Smelcer, Susan Navarro

doi:10.1017/s1049096512001242

Cited by 62 publications

(65 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Finally, previous findings regarding the impact of age on social media use are unsurprising: Older politicians are less likely to be active on social media (Lassen & Brown, 2011;Lawless, 2012;Peterson, 2012;Straus et al, 2013).…”

Section: Congress and Other Social Mediamentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Their research found that state legislative candidates running in districts with large numbers of constituents older than 55 years were less likely to use the Internet to contact supporters, and less likely to create campaign websites. Straus et al (2013) found that the distance between a member's district and Washington also might be an important factor in explaining social media presence as well. In some of their models, distance influenced the probability that a member adopted Twitter, with the intuition being that members representing communities located further away from the capital were more likely to use social media because it can function as a useful means of keeping in touch with the folks back home when traveling often to their district might not be possible.…”

Section: Congress and Other Social Mediamentioning

confidence: 98%

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#Selfie: Instagram and the United States Congress

O'Connell

2018

Social Media + Society

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This article is based on a content analysis of the 17,811 Instagram posts made by all 534 members of the United States Congress who were seated for the duration of the first 6 months of the 115th session. I find that women are significantly more likely than men to have an Instagram account. Senators and women post significantly more times to their accounts. And a member’s personal characteristics, such as their chamber, party, and age, had significant effects on the type of content posted to Instagram. I conclude that members of Congress use Instagram similarly to how they use other social media platforms, that parties in and out of power use Instagram in substantively different ways, and that the more personal accounts of younger members suggest future changes in Congressional representation.

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Section: Congress and Other Social Mediamentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Congress and Other Social Mediamentioning

confidence: 98%

#Selfie: Instagram and the United States Congress

O'Connell

2018

Social Media + Society

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“…Social media adoption by politicians has been well documented in recent years (e.g., Gainous and Wagner 2014;Gulati and Williams 2015;Straus et al 2013;StromerGalley 2014). While Twitter has been a popular platform for social media politicking, 1 Facebook boasted the highest usage rate by politicians and candidates in the 2010 and 2012 elections.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In 2010, just over 50 % of members of Congress(Straus et al 2013) and major party candidates(Gainous and Wagner 2014) had a Twitter account. 2 Sharon Angle (R-NV) is not included in the sample.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative Campaigning in the Social Media Age: Attack Advertising on Facebook

Auter

Fine

2016

Polit Behav

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Recent studies examine politicians' decisions to use social media, as well as the content of the messages that these political actors disseminate on social media platforms. We contribute to this literature by examining how race competitiveness and a candidate's position in the race relative to her opponent affect their decisions to issue attacks. Through content analysis of nearly 15,000 Facebook posts for tone (positive or negative), we find that while competitive races encourage both candidates to issue more negative posts, candidates in less competitive races embrace attack messages with more or less frequency depending on whether they trail or lead their opponent. We find that social media negativity is much more likely to be a desperation strategy employed by underdog candidates in less competitive races. We also run separate models examining the factors that drive policy and personal attacks. While underdog candidates are more likely to engage in issue attacks, candidates in competitive races are significantly more likely to use Facebook to make personal attacks.Keywords Elections Á Campaigns Á Negativity Á Social Media Our data and the replication code for each our models, as well as our online appendix, can be found online at the following

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“…In fact, recent research indicates that a large majority of representatives and senators are very active in social media (e.g. Straus et al 2013) while also suggesting that the target audience of social media messages may be di↵erent than the audience of newsletters, TV messages or press releases (Barbera 2014). This begs the question Do members of Congress adopt the same communication strategy independently of the media channel they use to communicate?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%