Comparing Online and Offline Political Support

Abstract

Do politicians carry on their interpersonal relations online? We examine how online political support compares to offline support. We overlay two data sets on political support among members of the Swiss National Council to estimate the explanatory power of online endorsements on offline cosponsorship signatures among members, using a gHypEG network regression model. Whereas offline support behavior is driven by a broad range of factors, such as network and homophily effects, endorsement is less diverse. Our findings show that online endorsement is predominantly driven by partisanship and does not mirror the richness found in offline support behavior. Zusammenfassung Inwiefern führen Politiker:innen ihre zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen online weiter? Wir untersuchen, wie sich politische Unterstützung online mit offline Unterstützung vergleicht. Hierzu überlagern wir zwei Datensätze über Bekundungen politischen Beistandes zwischen Mitgliedern des Schweizer Nationalrats. Anschliessend schätzen wir die Erklärungskraft, die online Unterstützung über offline Miträgerschaft in der Form von Unterschriften auf politischen Vorstössen (sog. Cosponsorship) hat. Die quantitative Schätzung führen wir mithilfe eines gHypEG Netzwerkregressionsmodels durch. Wobei das Unterstützungsverhalten offline durch

Disentangling Active and Passive Cosponsorship in the U.S. Congress

“…The analysis of cosponsorship decisions has been widely studied by experts of political science, e.g., [8,27,31]. Research on cosponsorship often focuses on three aspects: the agenda-setting dynamics of bill introductions and cosponsorship [21,24], how cosponsorship a ects bill passage [6,12,41,49,51], and alliances between legislators [4,5,15,22,23,28]. Despite political science research directly linking cosponsorship to the texts of bills and speeches in congress, cosponsorship has so far received little to no attention from the NLP community.…”