IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/apsrev/v109y2015i01p62-78_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Quantifying Social Media’s Political Space: Estimating Ideology from Publicly Revealed Preferences on Facebook

Author

Listed:
  • BOND, ROBERT
  • MESSING, SOLOMON

Abstract

We demonstrate that social media data represent a useful resource for testing models of legislative and individual-level political behavior and attitudes. First, we develop a model to estimate the ideology of politicians and their supporters using social media data on individual citizens’ endorsements of political figures. Our measure allows us to place politicians and more than 6 million citizens who are active in social media on the same metric. We validate the ideological estimates that result from the scaling process by showing they correlate highly with existing measures of ideology from Congress, and with individual-level self-reported political views. Finally, we use these measures to study the relationship between ideology and age, social relationships and ideology, and the relationship between friend ideology and turnout.

Suggested Citation

  • Bond, Robert & Messing, Solomon, 2015. "Quantifying Social Media’s Political Space: Estimating Ideology from Publicly Revealed Preferences on Facebook," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 109(1), pages 62-78, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:109:y:2015:i:01:p:62-78_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0003055414000525/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Zachary J. Auter & Jeffrey A. Fine, 2018. "Social Media Campaigning: Mobilization and Fundraising on Facebook," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 99(1), pages 185-200, March.
    2. Garz, Marcel & Sörensen, Jil & Stone, Daniel F., 2020. "Partisan selective engagement: Evidence from Facebook," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 177(C), pages 91-108.
    3. Cerina, Roberto & Duch, Raymond, 2020. "Measuring public opinion via digital footprints," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(3), pages 987-1002.
    4. Soojong Kim, 2019. "Directionality of information flow and echoes without chambers," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(5), pages 1-22, May.
    5. Ignacio Ramos-Vidal, 2022. "Structural Cohesion, Role Equivalence, or Homophily: Which Process Best Explains Social Homogeneity?," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(21), pages 1-18, November.
    6. Anjie Fang & Philip Habel & Iadh Ounis & Craig MacDonald, 2019. "Votes on Twitter: Assessing Candidate Preferences and Topics of Discussion During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election," SAGE Open, , vol. 9(1), pages 21582440187, March.
    7. Christopher J Fariss & James Lo, 2020. "Innovations in concepts and measurement for the study of peace and conflict," Journal of Peace Research, Peace Research Institute Oslo, vol. 57(6), pages 669-678, November.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:109:y:2015:i:01:p:62-78_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/psr .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.