Senators & Social Media: The Effect of Twitter on Electoral Support
Open Access
- Author:
- Crockett, Alianne
- Area of Honors:
- Political Science
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Marie Hojnacki, Thesis Supervisor
Michael Barth Berkman, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Incumbents
Senators
Twitter
X
Social Media
Elections
Electoral Support - Abstract:
- What explains the varying levels of electoral support candidates receive? Existing literature has emphasized the crucial roles of partisanship, ideological beliefs, challenger spending, and the incumbency advantage in electoral support for incumbents. However, very little research has been conducted on whether a modern factor - social media - could play a role in shaping electoral support. Using over 100,000 tweets from 110 incumbent senators, I study whether Twitter/X affected support for incumbents. I employ regression analyses to examine the impact of various factors on an incumbent's electoral support across four elections: the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections, as well as the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Specifically, I investigate whether an incumbent’s total tweets and their tweeting style – partisan, policy-focused, or constituent-focused – alongside other established influences on electoral support such as years of experience; Senate leadership positions; state government party control; and challenger campaign spending, influence the percentage of two-party votes received by incumbent senators. I discover that the established factors do indeed have significant effects on electoral support for incumbents, yet the effect of my social media variables is often insignificant. These findings suggest that factors other than an incumbent’s use of social media play the biggest role in influencing the electoral support they receive. However, given the limits of this analysis, studies using more recent data are necessary to completely comprehend the role that social media plays in influencing electoral support for incumbents.