Author(s)

Scot Schraufnagel¹, Quan Li², Adam Schuster³

¹Department of Political Science, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, USA.
²College of Political Science and Public Administration, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China.
³Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, USA.

The research examines the way in which members of the U.S. House of Representative represent themselves on the social network site Facebook. Each member’s activity is observed on seven different occasions and the frequency and substantive character of posts made during the second half of 2013 are established. The focus is on position-taking posts versus posts which mention the district the member serves in. Our expectation is that members from electorally safe districts will be more likely to advertise their policy positions while members from marginal districts will be more inclined to advertise their district connections. We control for minority party status, gender, and ideological extremism among other concerns and learn electoral safety is a good predictor of both “position-taking” and “district mentions”. Consistent with an electoral motive, we also find members from the minority party less likely to take positions on the issues of the day and more likely to mention the district they serve in.

U.S. House of Representatives, Facebook Posts, Electoral Motives, Credit Claiming

Schraufnagel, S. , Li, Q. and Schuster, A. (2017) District Partisan Homogeneity, Communications, and the Electoral Motive: An Analysis of the Facebook Posts of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Social Networking, 6, 148-163. doi: 10.4236/sn.2017.62009.