A Penny for Your Tweets: Campaign Contributions and Capitol Hill Microblogs

Who influences a politician’s public statements? In this paper, we explore one plausible explanation: that financial incentives from campaign contributors affect what politicians say. Based on this idea, we design text-driven models  for campaign contribution profile prediction. Using a large corpus of public microblog messages by members of the U.S. Congress, we find evidence for such an association, at the level of contributing industries. We find complementary strengths in a simple model (which has better predictive accuracy) and a more complex model (which gives a more intuitive, human-interpretable explanation).

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  International Conference on Web and Social Media

• Publication date

  2013-06-28

• Fields of study

  Computer Science, Political Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1609/icwsm.v7i1.14455
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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