A permanent campaign? Tweeting differences among members of Congress between campaign and routine periods

Vidar Vasko,Damian Trilling

doi:10.1080/19331681.2019.1657046

Vidar Vasko, Damian Trilling

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2019.1657046

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Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article investigates whether the notion of a “permanent campaign” characterizes politicians’ Twitter use by analyzing 285,456 tweets by Members of Congress during and after the 2016 US elections. We distinguished a campaign period, a lame duck period, and a routine period. The inclusion of a lame duck period is novel in studies on social networking sites and allows for more precise conclusions. In the routine period, politicians focused more on hard news, put more emphasis on domestic than foreign content on the country level, had a higher level of negative sentiment and published more tweets, whereas in the campaign period positive sentiment was higher. Additionally, we found large differences in politicians’ tweeting behavior between the lame duck and routine period. We conclude that the notion of a ‘permanent campaign’ does not appropriately describe political campaigning on Twitter, but that the exact differences are still poorly understood, as empirical findings do not align well with previous literature.

Highlights

For politicians choosing means to communicate with the public, the age of press conferences and press releases is steadily giving way to the age of social networking sites, even though traditional means of campaigning still dominate many campaigns (e.g., Ott, 2017; Enli, 2017; Craig, 2016; Nielsen, 2012)
This article investigates whether the notion of a “permanent campaign” characterizes politicians’ Twitter use by analyzing 285,456 tweets by Members of Congress during and after the 2016 US elections
Some researchers (e.g., Ornstein & Mann, 2000) have argued that today’s media environment has led to a state of a ‘permanent campaign’ (Blumenthal, 1980), largely eliminating differences between routine periods and campaign periods

Summary

Introduction

For politicians choosing means to communicate with the public, the age of press conferences and press releases is steadily giving way to the age of social networking sites, even though traditional means of campaigning still dominate many campaigns (e.g., Ott, 2017; Enli, 2017; Craig, 2016; Nielsen, 2012). Hillary Clinton announced her presidential candidacy by tweeting: “I’m running for president. – H” (Clinton, 2015). Donald Trump uses Twitter to communicate with the public, bypassing – and often harshly criticizing – traditional media: “The failing @nytimes is truly one of the worst newspapers. They knowingly write lies and never call to fact check. Bad people!” (Trump, 2015)

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