Quantifying Social Media’s Political Space: Estimating Ideology from Publicly Revealed Preferences on Facebook

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’ endorsemen...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American political science review 2015-02, Vol.109 (1), p.62-78
Main Authors: BOND, ROBERT, MESSING, SOLOMON
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attitudes
Behavior
Campaign contributions
Citizens
Donors
Educational Attainment
Estimates
Ideology
Inferences
Legislation
Legislative Bodies
Mass Media
Political Behavior
Political finance
Political science
Politicians
Politics
Polls & surveys
Preferences
Programming (Broadcast)
Social Media
Social networks
Voting
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0003-0554
1537-5943
DOI:10.1017/S0003055414000525