| ID | 141643 |
| Title Proper | Quantifying social media’s political space |
| Other Title Information | estimating ideology from publicly revealed preferences on facebook |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Messing, Solomon ; ROBERT BOND ; Bond, Robert |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | We demonstrate that social media data represent a useful resource for testing models of legislative and individual-level political behavior and attitudes. First, we develop a model to estimate the ideology of politicians and their supporters using social media data on individual citizens’ endorsements of political figures. Our measure allows us to place politicians and more than 6 million citizens who are active in social media on the same metric. We validate the ideological estimates that result from the scaling process by showing they correlate highly with existing measures of ideology from Congress, and with individual-level self-reported political views. Finally, we use these measures to study the relationship between ideology and age, social relationships and ideology, and the relationship between friend ideology and turnout. |
| `In' analytical Note | American Political Science Review Vol. 109, No.1; Feb 2015: p.62-78 |
| Journal Source | American Political Science Review 2015-03 109, 1 |
| Key Words | Political Space ; Quantifying Social Media ; Estimating Ideology ; Revealed Preferences on Facebook ; Political Behavior and Attitudes ; Social Relationships and Ideology |