Premium
Rockin' robins: Do congresswomen rule the roost in the Twittersphere?
Author(s) -
Evans Heather K.,
Ovalle Joycelyn,
Green Stephen
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.23383
Subject(s) - style (visual arts) , context (archaeology) , period (music) , politics , social media , political science , biology , law , art , literature , aesthetics , paleontology
Recent work by E vans, C ordova, and S ipole (2014) reveals that in the two months leading up to the 2012 election, female House candidates used the social media site T witter more often than male candidates. Not only did female candidates tweet more often, but they also spent more time attacking their opponents and discussing important issues in A merican politics. In this article, we examine whether the female winners of those races acted differently than the male winners in the 2012 election, and whether they differed in their tweeting‐style during two months in the summer of 2013. Using a hand‐coded content analysis of every tweet from each member in the U . S . H ouse of R epresentatives in J une and J uly of 2013, we show that women differ from their male colleagues in their frequency and type of tweeting, and note some key differences between the period during the election and the period after. This article suggests that context greatly affects representatives' T witter‐style.