ABSTRACT

How do candidates campaign on social media? To date, political scientists have mostly considered the content or tone of candidates’ social media posts. In this paper, we combine these research areas and study how candidates’ campaigns vary the content and tone of their messages. We argue incumbents emphasize positive issue content and limit attacking their opponent. Competitive races encourage positive mobilization posts and aggressive attack messages. Using Twitter data from the final two months of the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, we find that candidates predictably emphasize different types of messages and, in the aggregate, campaigns’ social media feeds significantly vary.

摘要

候选人如何在社交媒体上竞选？迄今为止，政治学家大多考虑了候选人社交媒体帖子的内容或语气。在本文中，我们结合了这些研究领域，研究了候选人的竞选活动如何改变其信息的内容和语气。我们认为在位者强调积极的问题内容，​​并限制攻击他们的对手。竞争性种族鼓励积极动员员额和激进的攻击信息。使用2018年美国中期选举的最后两个月的Twitter数据，我们发现候选人可以预见地强调不同类型的消息，并且总体而言，竞选活动的社交媒体供稿有很大不同。