Candidate Networks, Citizen Clusters, and Political Expression

Leticia Bode, Alexander Hanna, Junghwan Yang and Dhavan V. Shah

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2015, vol. 659, issue 1, 149-165

Abstract: Twitter provides a direct method for political actors to connect with citizens, and for those citizens to organize into online clusters through their use of hashtags (i.e., a word or phrase marked with # to identify an idea or topic and facilitate a search for it). We examine the political alignments and networking of Twitter users, analyzing 9 million tweets produced by more than 23,000 randomly selected followers of candidates for the U.S. House and Senate and governorships in 2010. We find that Twitter users in that election cycle did not align in a simple Right-Left division; rather, five unique clusters emerged within Twitter networks, three of them representing different conservative groupings. Going beyond discourses of fragmentation and polarization, certain clusters engaged in strategic expression such as “retweeting†(i.e., sharing someone else’s tweet with one’s followers) and “hashjacking†(i.e., co-opting the hashtags preferred by political adversaries). We find the Twitter alignments in the political Right were more nuanced than those on the political Left and discuss implications of this behavior in relation to the rise of the Tea Party during the 2010 elections.

Keywords: campaign communication; hashjacking; online communities; social media; Tea Party; Twitter; U.S. elections (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716214563923 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:659:y:2015:i:1:p:149-165

DOI: 10.1177/0002716214563923

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().