2017/11/28 by Lily McElwee, McElwee, Lily, Taha Yasseri +1
Social Sciences · #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Media Influence and Politics #Media Studies and Communication #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Social Media and Politics #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1711.10380
openalex publication_date 2017/11/28 · openalex created_date 2022/10/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
With social media penetration deepening among both citizens and political\nfigures, there is a pressing need to understand whether and how political use\nof major platforms is electorally influential. Particularly, the literature\nfocused on campaign usage is thin and often describe the engagement strategies\nof politicians or attempt to quantify the impact of social media engagement on\npolitical learning, participation, or voting. Few have considered implications\nfor campaign fundraising despite its recognized importance in American\npolitics. This paper is the first to quantify a financial payoff for social\nmedia campaigning. Drawing on candidate-level data from Facebook and Twitter,\nGoogle Trends, Wikipedia page views, and Federal Election Commission (FEC)\ndonation records, we analyze the relationship between the topic and volume of\nsocial media content and campaign funds received by all 108 candidates in the\n2016 US Senate general elections. By applying an unsupervised learning approach\nto identify themes in candidate content across the platforms, we find that more\nfrequent posting overall and of issue-related content are associated with\nhigher donation income when controlling for incumbency, state population, and\ninformation-seeking about a candidate, though campaigning-related content has a\nstronger effect than the latter when the number rather than value of donations\nis considered.\n