Birds of a Feather Tweet Together

Partisan Structure in
Online Social Networks

David B. Sparks
Duke University

images from: twitter.com

Congressional Twitterers
Congressional Research Service (2009)
• Republicans : Democrats :: 2 : 1
• 85 Tweets/day collectively
• Most status updates offer links to press releases,
etc.
• Only 1.4% of Congressional Tweets are replies
• Members refer more frequently to their districts when
on recess.
Social Network Analyses of Congress
• Co-sponsorship
• Fowler 2005, 2006
• Community structure and modularity
• Zhang, et al. 2008, Waugh et al. 2009
• Committee and caucus membership
• Porter et al. 2005, Victor and Ringe 2009
• Interest groups, lobbyist contributions, and
mailing lists
• Grossmann and Dominguez 2009, Koger and Victor
2009, Koger, Masket, and Noel 2009
• Ideological scaling
• Poole and Rosenthal, Bafumi and Herron 2007, etc.
Theory/Motivation
• Time and attention are limited, so spending these
is costly.
• Thus, Following an entity on Twitter is a signal
that the entity is something on which it is worth
spending resources.
• Thus, there is information about preferences
encoded in Following behavior.
Hypotheses
• Hypothesis 1: The online network of political
elites is distinctly partisan.

• Hypothesis 2: The allocation of attention by non-

elites reflects a partisan dimension.

• Hypothesis 3: Attention allocation preferences

reflect political ideology.
Hypotheses
• Hypothesis 1: The online network of political
elites is distinctly partisan.

• Hypothesis 2: The allocation of attention by non-

elites reflects a partisan dimension.

• Hypothesis 3: Attention allocation preferences

reflect political ideology.
H1: Partisan Network
• Following network among 133 Senators and
Representatives
• Two major partisan clusters
• In-group and cross-group ties:

• Freeman’s Segregation Index: 0.59

• Log odds ratio: 3.14
• Significant at p < 0.001
H1: Partisan Network
• Fuzzy clustering (Kaufman and Rosseeuw 1990)
on distance matrix from adjacencies
• Probabilities of each observation falling into each of
two clusters
• Good predictor of Democratic partisanship, less
so for Republicans
• Correctly classifies 74.4% of members, a 9%
improvement over guessing the modal party.
Hypotheses
• Hypothesis 1: The online network of political
elites is distinctly partisan.

• Hypothesis 2: The allocation of attention by non-

elites reflects a partisan dimension.

• Hypothesis 3: Attention allocation preferences

reflect political ideology.
Hypotheses
• Hypothesis 1: The online network of political
elites is distinctly partisan.

• Hypothesis 2: The allocation of attention by

non-elites reflects a partisan dimension.

• Hypothesis 3: Attention allocation preferences

reflect political ideology.
H2: Partisan Followers
Collected IDs of 117,837 users Following any
congressional account
• Mean legislators Followed: 2.2
• Mean Followers per legislator: 3,308
H2: Partisan Followers
• If Following behavior is a function of
partisanship, we would expect to see a tendency
to Follow MCs of only one party.
• The most prolific Followers tend toward the
center
• Generally media outlets and other completists
• Some prolific Followers do concentrate
exclusively on one Party
H2: Partisan Followers
• Two types of Followers, distinguished by
Following count
• “Major Followers” Follow more than 10 Member
accounts
• 90th percentile and above
• Predict number of Republicans Followed, as a
function of Democrats Followed and Major
Follower classification
Hypotheses
• Hypothesis 1: The online network of political
elites is distinctly partisan.

• Hypothesis 2: The allocation of attention by non-

elites reflects a partisan dimension.

• Hypothesis 3: Attention allocation preferences

reflect political ideology.
Hypotheses
• Hypothesis 1: The online network of political
elites is distinctly partisan.

• Hypothesis 2: The allocation of attention by

non-elites reflects a partisan dimension.

• Hypothesis 3: Attention allocation

preferences reflect political ideology.
H3: Ideological Following
• Person-to-group network of Followers and
legislative Twitterers
• Principal Component Analysis of the adjacency
matrix, to reduce dimensionality
• Generates scores for Followers
• and loadings for legislators
• If ideology explains Following behavior, it should
be encoded in the first few components
H3: Ideological Following
clairemc MarkUdall JeffFlake JohnKerry rogerwicker johnthune cbrangel

politikpundit 0 0 0 1 1 0 0

derjensen26 0 0 1 1 0 0 1

rawl4senate 0 0 1 1 1 1 1

johnny7268 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

ElderJustice 0 1 0 1 1 1 0

GR8GLFR 1 1 0 0 0 0 0

PJDente 0 1 0 0 0 0 0

politipage 0 0 0 1 1 0 0
H3: Ideological Following
• First and especially second components appear to
have ideological content
• Followers with scores at the extremes of the scale
“appear” to be highly ideological/partisan.
• Implying that Followers are well-sorted by the PCA
• Loadings for Member accounts have a clear
relationship with other measures of
ideology/partisanship.
H3: Ideological Following
• Linear discriminant analysis
• Predicting known partisanship of Members with
loadings on first two components
• Correctly identifies partisanship in 94.9% of cases.
• Linear regression analysis
• Predicting roll call-based Optimal Classification
scalings (Lewis and Poole 2000) with second
component loading, controlling for known
partisanship
• OC scaling correlates with 2nd Component at 0.762
H3: Ideological Following
• Regression results indicate a relationship between
Follower behavior and ideology
• Republican ideology predicted better than that of
Democrats.
Hypotheses
• Hypothesis 1: The online network of political
elites is distinctly partisan.

• Hypothesis 2: The allocation of attention by non-

elites reflects a partisan dimension.

• Hypothesis 3: Attention allocation preferences

reflect political ideology.
Conclusions
• Hypothesis 1: The online network of political
elites is distinctly partisan.
• Highly segregated network
• Fuzzy clustering based on network structure
accurately classifies Members by party.
• Hypothesis 2: The allocation of attention by non-
elites reflects a partisan dimension.
• Hypothesis 3: Attention allocation preferences
reflect political ideology.
Conclusions
• Hypothesis 1: The online network of political
elites is distinctly partisan.
• Hypothesis 2: The allocation of attention by non-
elites reflects a partisan dimension.
• “Major Followers” do not evince partisan leanings
• Completists?
• Amongst those Following a relatively small number of
Members, there is a negative relationship between
Republican and Democratic accounts Followed.
• Hypothesis 3: Attention allocation preferences
reflect political ideology.
Conclusions
• Hypothesis 1: The online network of political
elites is distinctly partisan.
• Hypothesis 2: The allocation of attention by non-
elites reflects a partisan dimension.
• Hypothesis 3: Attention allocation preferences
reflect political ideology.
• Scaling of Followers appears to correctly identify
partisans/ideologues
• Scaling of Members
• Successfully classifies partisanship
• Predicts accepted measure of ideology
Future Directions
• Scaling everything
• Challengers?
• Corporations?

• Diffusion of ideas through re-tweets and @

replies

• Communication with constituents

Thanks.