Mapping the Political Twitterverse: Finding Connections Between Political Elites

Abstract

Twitter provides a new and important tool for politicalactors, and is increasingly being used as such. In the2010 midterm elections, the vast majority of candidates forthe U.S. House of Representatives and virtually all candidatesfor U.S. Senate and governorships used Twitter toreach out to potential supporters, direct them to particularpieces of information, request campaign contributions, andmobilize their political action. Despite the level of activity,we have little understanding of what the political Twitterverselooks like in terms of communication and discourse.This project seeks to remedy that lack of understandingby mapping candidates for federal office in 2010 and theirfollowers, according to their use of the 4016 most used hashtags(keywords). Our data set is uniquely constructed fromtweets of most of the candidates running for the U.S. Houseof Representatives in 2010, all the candidates for the Senateand governorships, and a random sample of their followers.From this we utilize multidimensional scaling to constructa visual map based on hashtag usage. We find that ourdata have both local and global interpretations that reflectnot only political leaning but also strategies of communication.This study provides insight into innovation in newmedia usage in political behavior, as well as a snapshot ofthe political twitterverse in 2010.

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