Work

Do Male and Female Legislators Have Different Twitter Communication Styles?

Year: 2023

Type: article

Abstract: Communication is a fundamental step in the process of political representation, and an influential stream of research hypothesizes that male and female politicians talk to their constituents in very different ways. To build the broad dataset necessary for this analysis, we harness the massive trove of communication by American politicians through Twitter. We adopt a supervised learning approach that begins with the hand coding of over 10,000 tweets and then use these to train machine learning algorithms to categorize the full corpus of over three million tweets sent by the lower house state legislators who were serving in the summer of 2017. Our results provide insights into politicians’ behavior and the consequence of women’s underrepresentation on what voters learn about legislative activity.

Source: State Politics & Policy Quarterly

DOI: 10.1017/spq.2022.16

Authors: Daniel M. Butler, Thad Kousser, Stan Oklobdzija

Institutions: Washington University in St. Louis, University of California San Diego, University of California, Riverside

Language: English

Topic: Gender Politics and Representation

Subfield: Gender Studies

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Gender equality, Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,255