Abstract

Social media play an increasingly important role in political communication. Various studies investigated how individuals adopt social media for political discussion, to share their views about politics and policy, or to mobilize and protest against social issues. Yet, little attention has been devoted to the main actors of political discussions: the politicians. In this paper, we explore the topics of discussion of U.S. President Obama and the 50 U.S. State Governors using Twitter data and agenda-setting theory as a tool to describe the patterns of daily political discussion, uncovering the main topics of attention and interest of these actors. We examine over one hundred thousand tweets produced by these politicians and identify seven macro-topics of conversation, finding that Twitter represents a particularly appealing vehicle of conversation for American opposition politicians. We highlight the main motifs of political …

Date

2016

Authors

Xinxin Yang, Bo-Chiuan Chen, Mrinmoy Maity, Emilio Ferrara

Book

8th International Conference, SocInfo 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Volume

10046

Pages

330-344

Publisher

Springer