Congressional Tweets

By: Ben Richardson, Jacob Rosenberg, Joseph O'Hern

Our group has chosen eight different members of congress. There are four Republicans and four Democrats. The Democrats are Senator Claire McCaskill from MO, Congressmen Dennis Kucinnich from OH, and Senator Russ Feingold from WS and Congressmen Bruce Brailey from IA. The Republicans are Congressmen Michele Backmann from MN, Congressmen Steve King from IA, Senator Orin Hatch from UT, and Congressmen Eric Cantor from VA. We started collecting our data on 10/19/09-11/02/09. We used the program Archivist provided to us by the University of Iowa Libraries to collect our tweets. We wanted to answer four different questions, 1st, Who are the members of Congress you are studying, 2nd, How do they use twitter, 3rd, How are citizens using twitter to communicate with congress members, 4th, Who seems to be the most personable member of congress? The table below provides basic information on the eight different members of congress that we looked at.

Party ID

State

Started Using Twitter

# of followers

# of people followed

Increase or Decrease of Followers

# of posted tweets

Number of Tweets Collected

Geographic Location

Senator Claire McCaskill

D

MO

9/1/2008

34,270

1

Increasing

1130

90

US,Canada, South Africa

Congressmen Dennis Kucinnich

D

OH

6/1/2008

7504

15

Increasing

79

8

US,Canada, South Africa, Chile, Germany, UK

Senator Russ Feingold

D

WI

1/1/2009

7639

4998

Increasing

64

14

US, Canada, Iran, Ireland, UK

Congressman Bruce Brailey

D

IA

4/1/2009

229

227

Decreasing

1279

113

US

Congressmen Michele Backmann

R

MN

12/1/2008

9807

8819

Increasing

212

7

US, UK, Switzerland, Iran

Congressmen Steve King

R

IA

6/1/2009

969

35

Increasing

312

30

US, India, China, Australia

Senator Orrin Hatch

R

UT

12/1/2008

6850

7318

Increasing

359

49

US, Canada, Mexico, UK, Norway, South Korea, Philippines

Congressmen Eric Cantor

R

VA

4/1/2007

15906

34

Increasing

148

9

US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Brazil

In our recorded messages we had both messages posted by regular citizens about the members of congress and messages posted by the accounts of the eight members of congress. Some these messages posted by these accounts are posted by staff of the senator or congressman. Some elected officials such as Senator McCaskill post their own twitter messages. Posted below is a chart showing the number of messages each member of congress we examined posted in various categories.

 

Criticism

Interaction

Join Me

Local

Party

Policy

Other

ReferMe

Refer-Other

Total Tweets

Bruce Braley

50

0

0

0

0

39

0

24

0

113

Claire McCaskill

0

31

6

0

1

6

1

0

0

45

Dennis Kucinich

0

0

3

0

0

1

0

0

0

4

Russ Feingold

0

0

3

0

0

2

0

2

0

7

Michele Bachmann

5

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

1

7

Steve King

5

                   4

6

1

1

0

0

6

7

30

Eric Cantor

0

0

0

0

3

0

0

2

4

9

Orrin Hatch

13

3

5

0

4

5

0

8

11

49

The first category is “local”, which has to do with the member’s local events and concerns. This was a lonely category which had only one tweet by Congressmen Bruce Brailey of Iowa. He was the only member who posted anything from our collected tweets about a local event or concern.  

The second category is “join me”, which is tweet that has to do with were the member will be or was at and asking constituents to join him or her. This was a fairly popular category with a total tweet count of 23. Senator McCaskill and Congressmen King tied for most amounts of tweets dealing with the “join me” category. They each had six tweets. An example of a “join me” tweet would be “join me on the Capitol steps Thursday at 12 to protest Nancy Pelosi’s 1990 pg, 894 bil government takeover of healthcare”, a tweet posted by Congressmen Steve King. It’s interesting that Congressmen Cantor, the most tenured tweeter of our group, had no “join me” tweets; and someone like Congressmen King who started almost two years after Congressmen Cantor has six times the amount of “join me” tweets.   

The third category is “policy”, which is a tweet that has some kind of statement about a certain policy viewpoint. This was the second highest tweeting category with 53 total tweets. This number may be a little misleading considering the fact that Congressmen Brailey made up almost 74% of the total tweets with 39. The next highest tweet total was six, posted by Senator McCaskill. These tweets were made up of messages like “Rep. Bruce Braley - Iowa, @BruceBraley, sponsor of Plain Language Act of 2009, says complex writing is endemic in Wash. D.C #simplification”. Congressman Brailey had many tweets like the one listed above as well as the other five members that made up this category. An interesting note to this category of tweets, the only three not to have a tweet that fell under the category of “policy” were all Republicans.

The fourth category is “refer-me”, which is a tweet that is about where you can go to see a members point of view or read a statement he or she has made. There were a total of 43 tweets under this category, Congressmen Brailey once again lead the pack with 24 out of a total 43 tweets; making up over 50% of the total number of tweets.  The next highest number of tweets was eight and those were posted by Senator Hatch. This category had tweets from all but two members.

The fifth category is “refer-other”, which is a see more information tweet. There were a total of 23 tweets in this category. Senator Hatch led this category with a total of 11 “refer-other” tweets. This was one of the least posted tweets out of the nine categories. Only half of the members had a posted tweet that fell under this category. Of the four that posted, all were Republican; leaving no Democrats that posted under this category.

The sixth category is “criticism”, which refers to a tweet that criticizes government or the opposing party. This was the most popular of the nine categories with a total of 73 tweets. Starngley enough, of the all the members only four had tweets that fell under the “criticism” category.  Once again Congressmen Brailey made up a staggering percentage of the tweets with almost 69% of the total tweets. Congressmen Brailey had a grand total of 50 “criticism” tweets; the member with the second most “criticism” tweets was Senator Hatch with 13. It is worth noting that of the four members who posted tweets under this category all but one were Republicans, but Democratic Congressmen Brailey still had over twice as many “criticism” tweets.

The seventh category is “party”, which is a party related or party action tweet. This was not a very popular tweeting category with only eight total tweets. Senator Hatch led the group with four total “party” tweets. There were only three out of the eight members that had a tweet that fell under the “party” category. An example of a “party” tweet is “Here's a copy of the letter that every Republican Senator sent to the Democrat Leader” posted by Senator Hatch.

The eighth category is “interaction”, which is a tweet that deals with individual or constituent interaction. There were a total of 38 tweets that fell under the “interaction” category. Senator McCaskill led the group with 31 out of the 38 tweets. That is almost 82% of the total number of tweets for this category. This was Senator McCaskill’s highest tweet count making up 31 out of the 45 tweets that fit into these categories.

The ninth and final category is “other”, which is a tweet that did not fit into any of the other eight categories. Of the 264 tweets in all nine categories, the “other” category only makes up .0075% of the total tweets. Senator McAskill was the only member to have a tweet fall under this category with a total of two. The only other category that had only one member in it was “local”.    

There was quite a variety of different congressional tweets, ranging from only one tweet in a category to having 73 in a category.  The top two categories were “criticism” and “policy”. “Criticism” came in at number one with 73 total tweets and “policy” came in a distant second with 53 total tweets. It’s interesting to note that of both of these categories; Congressmen Bruce Brailey filled a large majority of the recorded tweets. Congressmen Brailey had a total of 50 criticism related tweets and 39 tweets having dealt with policy issues. Tweets having to do with local events and concerns came in last with only one tweet issued by Congressmen Steve King. The second lowest tweeting category was the “other” category which had only two tweets written by Senator Claire McCaskill. 

We also looked at the citizens and how they are responding to the members and what type of tone they taking in their responses or comments. We broke up the citizen’s tweets into categories, much like we did with the congressional tweets. We sampled 100 messages from each of the eight mebers with the exception of Senator McCaskill, we sampled 200 messages due to being the most personable member of congress we looked at and her overall popularity on twitter. We decided to sample only 100 messages to narrow our search criteria to a managable number. The categories we used for the citizens tweets are below.

Members

Number of Tweets Recorded

%Insult

%Ciriticism Polocy

%Praise Policy

%Conversation

%Thanks Congrats

%Refer

%Repeat

%Other

Congressmen Michele Bachman

1748

8

0

20

6

0

48

18

0

Congressmen Steve King

94

35

1

14

0

4

31

15

0

Congressmen Eric Cantor

392

25

1

9

1

4

27

45

0

Senator Orin Hatch

1740

24

5

31

2

5

7

22

0

Senator Claire McCaskill

2204

10

33

7

22

7

8

9

0

Senator Russ Fiengold

614

0

69

14

3

5

4

5

2

Congressmen Bruce Brailey

3

0

0

100

0

0

0

0

0

Congressmen Dennis Kucinnich

402

0

68

6

0

8

5

10

2

The citizens are tweeting about a great variety of different topics. As you can see from the table above there are 9 different categories that a citizens tweet can be coded in; ranging from something as simple as a referral or something more in depth like a tweet about the deficit or foreign policy. The category that seems to be most common of all the tweets is the “praise” category for Republicans and the "criticism' category for Democrats. Of the messages we sampled 260 tweets related to the topic of healthcare. This seemed to be a very popular topic among both the Republican and the Deomcratic members. Most of the tweets dealing with healthcare for the Republican members were positive or supportive, while the messages refurring to healthcare for the Democrats were overwhelmingly negative. Congressmen Dennis Kucinnich led the group with 72% of his citizen messages concerning healthcare. A majority of these healthcare tweets tended to be negative. Of the 72% tweets that Congressmen Kucinnich received, 91% were negative, of the 65% of citizen tweets that Senator Fiengold received 87% were negative, and of the 48% of citizen tweets that Senator McCaskill received 87% were negative. These three members had the most messages pertaining to healthcare; but this was a trend that we saw throughout the healthcare tweets. The next most popular category for the Democrats was the “criticism” category; they had a total of 34% of citizen tweets that had to do with a criticism to a certain policy position that the member held. Senator Feingold and Congressmen Kucinnich lead the group with 69% and 68% of there total citizen tweets collected. Surprisingly Congressmen Bachman had 0% of tweets that dealt with "criticism". Congressmen Bachman was the only member to have 0 tweets fall under this catagory. This could be indictive of the fact that healthcare issues are includeed under the "criticism" catagory. Which would explain why the Democratic memebers seem to have a larger percentage of tweets relating to the 'criticism" catagory compared to the Republican members. The reason that Republican members positive support is high, is because our recorded twitter messages about health care were dominated by users posting messages against the Democratic proposals for health care reform. All of the Republican members of Congress we looked at were opposed to the Democrats healthcare plan. The Deomcratic members, however, were all pro healthcare and therefore recieved much more oppisiton than most of the Republican memebers. Republican members recieved the same type of tweets as the Democrats but they were directed in support of the Republicans stance on healthcare reform.

Memebers

% of messages regarding health care

% Supportive/Positive messages

 % negative/critical messages

Congressmen Michile Bachman

18

100

0

Congressmen Steve King

15

94

6

Congressmen Eric Cantor

9

89

11

Senator Orin Hatch

35

85

15

Senator Claire McCaskill

48

13

87

Senator Russ Feingold

65

13

87

Congressmen Bruce Brailey

0

0

0

Congressmen Dennis Kucinnich

72

9

91

Of all eight members of congress that we collected tweets from we decided that Senator McCaskill was the most personable. She had the second most number of posted tweets out of the eight members we researched. She also had the most number of followers at 34,270; which was over 18,000 more followers than the next closest member of congress. Her messages had a wide variety of comments ranging from healthcare to the armed services. The overall tones of a lot of the messages were negative; but that is not to say that she went without any positive messages. Below is a list of ten selected tweets from citizens who either follow or just decided to leave Senator McCaskill a message. They are broken up into positive and negative tweets. There was a total of six negative and four positive tweets. You can see that of the six negative tweets three out of the six mention healthcare. This seemed to be a reoccurring theme for Senator McCaskill. The negative posts were much more specific than the positive posts, usually referring to a specific policy Senator McCAskill either was for or against.  Not all of the healthcare related posts were negative. The lists of positive tweets were all about different topics, and seemed more general than the negative tweets. Overall, Senator McCaskill seemed to have the biggest effect on her fellow tweeters according to the responses and posts she received throughout the time we followed her account. Below are two examples of a typical conversation held between Senator McAskill and a citizen.

Carlabond: @clairecmc Don't teachers have "real" jobs? I gather that a lot of jobs were saved in that field. And 4 the future, it's even more important  !
Carlabond: @clairecmc You should be making liberal use of the "block" feature. Opposing view is healthy, rude attacks are not.
Clairemc: @carlabond Maybe you're right. I've resisted the temptation to block, but some are so over the top it's unbelievable.
Carlabond: @clairecmc One of the advantages to NOT being in the public eye is not having to deal w/such stuff here. Know that you ARE appreciate

WoodyPfister : @Clairecmc - Have you received instructions from ACORN and SEIU on healh care vote,yet? Holding out for socialized option? #handsoff #ACORN
WoodyPfister:  @Clairecmc comes off as an over-caffeinated, sugared cheer leader for Pres BHO and Porkulus, HCR and Cap'nTax plans #HandsOff #ACORN #HCR
WoodyPfister:  @clairecmc - Why is Pres taking so long to decide on Afghan when he wants  Congr to vote on $trillion bills no one reads?
WoodyPfister: @clairecmc. Sen. Claire  You voted for ARRA and Omnibus - both larded with ear marks,  although masked in ARRA Not Financially Responsibile.
Clairecmc: @WoodyPfister  I voted no on Omnibus. I disagree that ARRA had earmarks.
WoodyPfister: @clairecmc $ Billion for  "Clean Coal" demo over in Illinois was a back door ear mark in ARRA.
WoodyPfister: @clairecmc. Glad your Tweeting, Pls tell the Pres to keep the Iranian ppl in mind when he sits down with the man who stole the election.
Clairecmc: @WoodyPfister I disagree,they competed for that project under Bush administrtn,they won competition but funding  pulled near end of process.
WoofyPfister: @clairecmc Thanks, Sen but plug pulled on NextGen Coal because too expensive. Durbin, Gephardt, and Bob Livingston got it earmarked in ARRA

 

Posted below are the links for our XML and XLS files:

boyntons.us/~multimedia09/congressionaltweetsgroup3brucebraley.xlsx

boyntons.us/~multimedia09/congressionaltweetsgroup3clairecmc.xml

boyntons.us/~multimedia09/congressionaltweetsgroup3/clairecmc.xlsx

boyntons.us/~multimedia09/congressionaltweetsgroup3/russfeingold.xml

boyntons.us/~multimedia09/congressionaltweetsgroup3/russfeingold.xlsx

boyntons.us/~multimedia09/congressionaltweetsgroup3/dennis_kucinich.xlsx

boyntons.us/~multimedia09/congressionaltweetsgroup3/dennis_kucinich.xml

boyntons.us/~multimedia09/congressionaltweetsgroup3/ericcantor.xlsx

boyntons.us/~multimedia09/congressionaltweetsgroup3/ericcantor.xml

boyntons.us/~multimedia09/congressionaltweetsgroup3/michelebachmann.xlsx

boyntons.us/~multimedia09/congressionaltweetsgroup3/michelebachmann.xml

boyntons.us/~multimedia09/congressionaltweetsgroup3/orinhatch.xlsx

boyntons.us/~multimedia09/congressionaltweetsgroup3/orinhatch.xml

boyntons.us/~multimedia09/congressionaltweetsgroup3/stevekingpress1.xml

boyntons.us/~multimedia09/congressionaltweetsgroup3/stevekingpress1.xlsx