The impact of twitter adoption on decision making in politics

Reza Mousavi, Bin Gu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Organizations have used social media extensively to engage customers, but little is known whether such engagement truly influences organizations' decisions to make them closer to their customers. This paper studies this question in a unique context - the impact of adoption of Twitter on U.S. Congressmen's voting behavior. In particular, we consider whether the adoption makes Congressmen to vote more in line with the political orientation of their constituents. We constructed a panel data for 442 Members of the 111th U.S. House of Representatives across a period of 24 months. We exploit the variation in joining Twitter across Congressmen to identify the impact of joining Twitter on voting behavior. Using a fixed effect model, we found that the adoption of Twitter makes Congressmen to vote more in line with their constituents. That is, in districts where Congressmen are more conservative than the constituent Twitter adoption results in less conservative votes by Congressmen. Similarly, in districts where Congressmen are more liberal than the constituent, Twitter adoption results in less liberal votes by the Congressmen.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 48th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2015
EditorsTung X. Bui, Ralph H. Sprague
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages4854-4863
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781479973675
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 26 2015
Event48th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2015 - Kauai, United States
Duration: Jan 5 2015Jan 8 2015

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Volume2015-March
ISSN (Print)1530-1605

Other

Other48th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityKauai
Period1/5/151/8/15

Keywords

  • Online social media
  • Political orientation
  • Twitter adoption
  • U.S. congress

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Engineering(all)

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