Public Spheres in Twitter- and Blogosphere. Evidence from the US

Christoph Waldhauser

(Submitted on 27 Aug 2014)

The political requires a forum for its deliberation and Habermas has located it in the public spheres. Originally, mass media's role was one of a facilitator of these debates. However, under the immense pressures of free market competition and mobile audiences, mass media prefers episodic over thematic news. On the opposite end of the spectrum, social media has been heralded as a new forum, a reincarnation of the ailing public spheres to further the deliberation of the political. But do the followers of political parties in social media endorse thematic or episodic content?
To answer this question, I look at the most recent 3,200 tweets that were broadcast from the Republican and Democratic Twitter accounts. By employing Latent dirichlet allocation, I extract the prevailing topics of these tweets and linked websites. Generalized linear models are used to describe the relationship between episodicity, thematicity and the endorsement counts of the posts analyzed.
I find that there is a stark contrast between the behavior of Democratic and Republican followers. In general, there seems to be a slight preference for thematic messages. Interestingly, the distance to an election increases the odds of a message to be endorsed.