Research Agenda

My research agenda centers around how American political elites, such as candidates for office or interest groups, publicly communicate, with a focus on their use of new technologies like social media. I also study fundraising by political campaigns. My work has been published at Electoral Studies, PS: Political Science & Politics, the Journal of Law & Courts, the Journal of Women, Politics, & Policy, and the Journal of Quantitative Description.

Most of my research examines political communication by political elites and its effects. In my book project, Tweeting For Your Audience (working title), I use tweets and and friends and followers data for all US House candidates from 2018-2022 to show that campaigns are able to reach multiple audiences simultaneously on Twitter/X (national partisans, the media, interest groups, and each other). Through their use of Twitter/X, the campaigns benefit on-platform from greater engagement and building relationships with their audiences and off-platform through campaign contributions.

I incorporate aspects of both political behavior and political institutions in my work, using big data and modern machine learning methods. Though my main area of substantive focus is congressional campaigns, I have also applied these approaches to political communication by other political actors such as interest groups and police departments. At best, these new technologies may lower the barrier for entry into the political process; at worst, they incentivize more polarizing rhetoric and negative sentiment. My goal in studying political communication is twofold. First, I use social media data to test long-standing questions in political science research. Second, I seek to understand how the impact of who a political audience is, combined with the means of communicating, affects how elite political actors behave and what issues they emphasize.

It has recently become more difficult to access social media data, and therefore to study political elites. In response to this, I am a part of an interdisciplinary team working to collect handles and posts of 2024 candidates (state and federal) across several social media platforms and make them publicly available for scholars, journalists, and non-profits. Read more at https://www.candidata24.org/.

select works in progress

Bureaucratic Responsiveness in Times of Crisis: The 2020 Mass Protests and Police Department Social Media (with Anna Gunderson). Revise & re-submit at Urban Affairs Review.

In 2020, cities across the country experienced mass protest in the aftermath of fatal police violence against Black Americans. An open question, however, is whether the departments listened to and engaged with the conversations around police reform. To explore how responsive police agencies are to local protests, we connect two datasets: the Crowd Counting Consortium data on 2020 protests and data on the Facebook activity of all police departments in the country in that same year. We investigate differences in police department responses to protest and hypothesize that these posts will be more likely in cities that are more racially diverse and more Democratic. We also argue that cities that experience protest should engage more with social justice terms and the demands of those movements. We find mixed evidence for these expectations, however. More Republican cities are less likely to post about all kinds of protests, but racial demographics do not appear to make a difference. Moreover, places with protests are not more likely to post about social justice. This paper provides initial evidence that social media is a necessary, but not sufficient, tool for the police to engage in meaningful, transformative conversations with their communities about race, justice, and equity in policing.

Candidates be Posting: Multi-Platform Strategies and Partisan Preferences in the 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections (with Jo Lukito, Bin Chen, Stephen Prochaska, Yunkang Yang, Megan A. Brown, Jason Greenfield, Jiyoun Suk, Wei Zhong, Ross Dahlke, and Porismita Borah). Revised & re-submitted at Social Media & Society.

In this multi-platform, comparative study, we analyze social media messages from political candidates (N = 1,517) running for congress during the 2022 U.S. Midterm election. We collect data from seven social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Truth Social, Gettr, Instagram, YouTube, and Rumble over the four weeks before and after election day. With this unique dataset of posts, we apply computational methods to identify messages that sought to mobilize individuals (online and offline) to donate money, vote, attend events, engage with the campaign online, and visit the campaign’s content on other platforms. We find that Democrats were not on alt-tech platforms in 2022 and that both Republicans and Democrats use video-based platforms for multiple mobilization strategies. Mobilization messages varied for House and Senate candidates of both parties across platforms,  before and after election day.

The Democratizing and Polarizing Impact of Fundraising on Twitter: Easy Money, Viral Incentives, and the Catalyzing Role of Mainstream Media (with Joshua A. Tucker and Jonathan Nagler)

What is the effect of social media on campaign fundraising? We propose two pathways through which campaigns can raise money through their tweets: directly via Twitter users seeing their tweets and indirectly through retweets by media and journalists, who spread a campaign's message beyond the users who would have otherwise seen the tweet. Previous work suggests that a main audience for campaigns on Twitter are journalists and the media. However, we do not know the extent to which this is true, or for which candidates. We find that on the days congressional campaigns received more retweets, they also received more contributions. Further, we find that hundreds of campaigns were retweeted thousands of times by national news media and receive higher predicted contributions than when they were not. This difference is largest when the campaigns tweeted about nationally salient and polarizing topics such as Donald Trump or abortion-- overall, and separately for candidates in safe and competitive seats and for incumbents and non-incumbents. Campaigns in competitive seats and non-incumbents further receive higher predicted contributions when they do not tweet about nationally salient topics and are retweeted by local news media. Our results suggest that Twitter can offer campaigns a pathway to build up resources and support nationwide, mediated by the traditional news media, but incentivizes politicians to tweet about nationally polarizing and salient topics to gain media coverage and appeal to national, partisan individuals.

Do Small Donors Make a Big Difference in U.S. Elections?: Evidence from 50 Million Campaign Contributions (with Rachel Porter and Megan A. Brown)

This paper leverages 50 million small and large contributions to 2020 and 2022 House campaigns, linked to a national voter file and geolocated to the donor's congressional district. With these data, we examine three common claims about small donors and their impact: whether they 1) diversify the donorate, 2) provide a viable fundraising base under small-dollar matching programs, and 3) direct seed funding to extreme candidates, propelling them to office. We find that while small donors do diversify the donorate, their share of the contribution pool is so minimal it may not amplify the voices of the underrepresented. We also show that some small donor matching programs improve candidates' fundraising potential, but less than a third of candidates meet eligibility requirements. Importantly, public financing programs that only match constituent contributions do not elevate candidate fundraising. Finally, contrary to conventional wisdom, we demonstrate that small contributions are unlikely to propel extreme candidates into office. We hope our analyses provide context for researchers and public policy experts navigating the nuances of campaign finance reform.

Reaching Across the Political Aisle: Overcoming Challenges in Using Social Media for Recruiting Politically Diverse Respondents (with Megan A. Brown, Nejla Asimovic, Rajeshwari Majumdar, Lena Song, Laura Huber, Sarah Graham, Abby Budiman, Joshua A. Tucker, & Jonathan Nagler). Under review.

A challenge for public opinion surveys across modes today is achieving representativeness of respondents across relevant political characteristics such as attitudes and demographics. We focus here on overcoming known challenges in online recruiting of Republican respondents for surveys on American politics by testing recruitment strategies using Facebook ads. While the use of Facebook ads for recruitment has increased and offers potential benefits, such a recruitment strategy suffers from a lack of Republican engagement relative to Democrats and Independents. In this project we focus on one feature which may influence a potential participant to click on an ad, consent to begin, and complete a survey: the institution listed as fielding the survey. We argue that a potential participant’s trust, or lack of trust, in an institution will affect whether they choose to participate. We focus on the relevant case of academic institutions. Respondents are recruited through two otherwise identical Facebook pages and ads listing: New York University (NYU, a university from a more liberally-perceived state) and the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss, a university from a less liberally-perceived state). We predict that Republicans will be most likely to both begin and complete surveys from Ole Miss, followed by CSMaP Research Center, and least likely to do so for surveys from NYU. Additionally, we will assess whether the Republicans who agree to participate under each treatment differ from each other in terms of easily observed characteristics such as education and region, and also, more importantly, in their political attitudes. Our findings will be a useful step forwards in overcoming existing challenges in recruiting Republicans for research.