scholarly journals Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Barberá
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Latent Variable ◽  
Ideal Point ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Estimation ◽  
Potential Contribution ◽  
Online Behavior ◽  
The Social ◽  
Party Registration ◽  
Twitter Users

Politicians and citizens increasingly engage in political conversations on social media outlets such as Twitter. In this article, I show that the structure of the social networks in which they are embedded can be a source of information about their ideological positions. Under the assumption that social networks are homophilic, I develop a Bayesian Spatial Following model that considers ideology as a latent variable, whose value can be inferred by examining which politics actors each user is following. This method allows us to estimate ideology for more actors than any existing alternative, at any point in time and across many polities. I apply this method to estimate ideal points for a large sample of both elite and mass public Twitter users in the United States and five European countries. The estimated positions of legislators and political parties replicate conventional measures of ideology. The method is also able to successfully classify individuals who state their political preferences publicly and a sample of users matched with their party registration records. To illustrate the potential contribution of these estimates, I examine the extent to which online behavior during the 2012 US presidential election campaign is clustered along ideological lines.

Estimates of the Spatial Voting Model

2019 ◽  
pp. 818-838
Author(s):  
Christopher Hare ◽  
Keith T. Poole
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Model ◽  
Ideal Point ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Geometric Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Estimation ◽  
Empirical Estimates ◽  
Spatial Voting ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Choices

In this chapter, the authors survey the empirical success of the spatial (or geometric) theory of voting. Empirical work lagged behind the development of theory until about 30 years ago and since then has exploded, with ideal-point estimation emerging as an important methodological subfield in political science. Empirical applications of spatial theory are now legion, and the basic news is that the spatial model has been enormously successful in explaining observed political choices and outcomes at both the elite and mass levels. In the United States, empirical estimates of the spatial model also help to explain incongruities between the median voter theorem and party polarization. These empirical estimates have demonstrated that the theory is extremely powerful on a number of levels—indeed, that it is one of the most successful mathematical theories in the social sciences.

scholarly journals Universal patterns of long-distance commuting and social assortativity in cities

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eszter Bokányi ◽  
Sándor Juhász ◽  
Márton Karsai ◽  
Balázs Lengyel
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Universal Relation ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Low Income Groups ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Diverse Individual ◽  
Commuting Distance

AbstractMillions commute to work every day in cities and interact with colleagues, partners, friends, and strangers. Commuting facilitates the mixing of people from distant and diverse neighborhoods, but whether this has an imprint on social inclusion or instead, connections remain assortative is less explored. In this paper, we aim to better understand income sorting in social networks inside cities and investigate how commuting distance conditions the online social ties of Twitter users in the 50 largest metropolitan areas of the United States. An above-median commuting distance in cities is linked to more diverse individual networks, moreover, we find that longer commutes are associated with a nearly uniform, moderate reduction of overall social tie assortativity across all cities. This suggests a universal relation between long-distance commutes and the integration of social networks. Our results inform policy that facilitating access across distant neighborhoods can advance the social inclusion of low-income groups.

scholarly journals Classification of Arabic Twitter Users: A Study Based on User Behaviour and Interests

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdullatif Alabdullatif ◽  
Basit Shahzad ◽  
Esam Alwagait
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Networking ◽  
Interactive Media ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Social ◽  
Online Behaviour ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Types Of Information ◽  
Interest Similarity ◽  
A Company

Social networks are among the most popular interactive media today due to their simplicity and their ability to break down the barriers of community rules and their speed and because of the increasing pressures of work environments that make it more difficult for people to visit or call friends. There are many social networking products available and they are widely used for social interaction. As the amount of threading data is growing, producing analysis from this large volume of communications is becoming increasingly difficult for public and private organisations. One of the important applications of this work is to determine the trends in social networks that depend on identifying relationships between members of a community. This is not a trivial task as it has numerous challenges. Information shared between social members does not have a formal data structure but is transmitted in the form of texts, emoticons, and multimedia. The inspiration for addressing this area is that if a company is advertising a sports product, for example, it has a difficulty in identifying targeted samples of Arab people on social networks who are interested in sports. In order to accomplish this, an experiment oriented approach is adopted in this study. A goal for this company is to discover users who have been interacting with other users who have the same interests, so they can receive the same type of message or advertisement. This information will help a company to determine how to develop advertisements based on Arab people’s interests. Examples of such work include the timely advertisement of the utilities that can be effectively marketed to increase the audience; for example, on the weekend days, the effective market approaches can yield considerable results in terms of increasing the sales and profits. In addition, finding an efficient way to recommend friends to a user based on interest similarity, celebrity degree, and online behaviour is of interest to social networks themselves. This problem is explored to establish and apply an efficient and easy way to classify a social network of Arab users based on their interests using available types of information, whether textual or nontextual, and to try to increase the accuracy of interest classification. Since most of the social networking is done from the mobiles nowadays, the efficient and reliable algorithm can help in developing a robust app that can perform the tweet classification on mobile phones.

The Social Networks of Chinese Students Studying in France (中国留学生在法国的社会关系)

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Carnine
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Mixed Method ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Chinese Students ◽  
The United States ◽  
Studying Abroad ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The One ◽  
Method Approach

Today close to one third of the world’s internationally mobile student population is from China, and as the trend for Chinese to study abroad grows exponentially, newer destination countries are added, some of them non-Anglophone, such as France. Regardless of where they study, Chinese students have a reputation for sticking together when abroad and for not mixing with locals. Yet what types of relationship actually come into being now that Chinese are going abroad in such unprecedented numbers? This paper is based on a broader empirical study conducted in 2011-12 from fieldwork in France, the United States, and China (N = 180) and again in 2015 in France (N = 10). The study uses a mixed-method approach based on quantitative Social Network Analysis (sna) and 25 qualitative interviews to analyze the composition of students’ social networks. The paper focuses on Chinese studying in France (N = 55). By examining different types of relationships, how they are initiated, and how resources are shared, the paper discusses how internationally mobile Chinese students interact socially, on the one hand with non-Chinese (French nationals or other international persons) and, on the other, with local Chinese immigrants. The results show that students form strong co-national relationships among themselves but not with established ethnic and migrant Chinese communities in France. As for transnational relationships, individual will and the institutional frameworks for studying abroad that underpin language and accommodation choices are found to play crucial roles in fostering local contacts with non-Chinese.今天跨国流动的学生总人数中有三分之一来自中国。然而，中国留学生有自我封闭，不同所在国当地人交往的名声。由此提出了在庞大的海外中国留学生群体中，他们的社会关系类型的问题。基于社会网络分析 (sna) 方法，我们于 2011-12 年在法国，美国和中国，2015 年在法国进行的实证研究，运用混合方法来分析中国留学生的社会网络构成。本文侧重分析中国留学生样本 (N = 55) 在法国的情况，讨论中国留学生内部，他们与其他国际学生，他们并与当地华人移民的社会交往互动。结果表明中国留学生内部之间频繁的合作关系起着关键作用，但它并不属于传统上意义上的海外华人网络。中国留学生跨国关系的形成有赖于他们的个人意愿和留学制度框架，并对他们同当地非华人的接触交往起到了至关重要的促进作用。This article is in Chinese Language

scholarly journals An Evolutionary View of the U.S. Supreme Court

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Noah Giansiracusa
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Ideal Point ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Estimation ◽  
Hyperbolic Metrics ◽  
Tree Estimation ◽  
Evolutionary View ◽  
Euclidean Setting

The voting patterns of the nine justices on the United States Supreme Court continue to fascinate and perplex observers of the Court. While it is commonly understood that the division of the justices into a liberal branch and a conservative branch inevitably drives many case outcomes, there are finer, less transparent divisions within these two main branches that have proven difficult to extract empirically. This study imports methods from evolutionary biology to help illuminate the intricate and often overlooked branching structure of the justices’ voting behavior. Specifically, phylogenetic tree estimation based on voting disagreement rates is used to extend ideal point estimation to the non-Euclidean setting of hyperbolic metrics. After introducing this framework, comparing it to one- and two-dimensional multidimensional scaling, and arguing that it flexibly captures important higher-dimensional voting behavior, a handful of potential ways to apply this tool are presented. The emphasis throughout is on interpreting these judicial trees and extracting qualitative insights from them.

scholarly journals The Ethnic Dimensions in Social Movements

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Oliver
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
Group Formation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Ethnic Boundaries ◽  
The Social

This paper draws on work in the social construction of race and ethnicity to explain why race/ethnic divisions are so often axes of domination and why these divisions are central to social movements. (1) Ethnic/racial groups are constructed in political processes that are tied to state formation and social movements. Many states (including the United States) have an ethnic/racial bias or footprint in their construction. Ethnic/racial groups that are numerical majorities have an advantage in determining state policies and state actions that advantage dominant groups over subordinate groups, create chains of interrelations that amplify differences in power and privilege, and take actions to prohibit or prevent reparations or redress for these past actions. (2) Network isolation and intergenerational transmission interact with structures of domination to reproduce domination over time. “Ethnicity” matters when ethnic boundaries are relatively sharp, consequential, and highly correlated with domination structures and social networks. Strong “ethnic” boundaries tend to divide societies into majorities and minorities. (3) Dominant groups develop and reproduce cultures of domination that include both hostile and benign paternalistic relations with other groups. Subordinate groups develop and reproduce cultures that intermingle opposition and submission. Collective identities are both imposed from without by the actions of others and asserted from within. Identities and cultural practices are developed collectively within social networks and influenced by the actions and speech of political actors, including social movements. (4) Regardless of whether their goals are group-oriented or issue-oriented, all movements in an ethnically-divided or ethnically-hierarchical society have an “ethnic” dimension in the sense that they draw from or map onto one or more ethnic groups. Movements arising from privileged “ethnic” majorities have different dynamics from movements by disadvantaged “ethnic” minorities or mixed-ethnic movements. Processes of group formation derived from theories of the social construction of ethnicity illuminate other movement-relevant group formation processes, including class formation and political subcultures. Lying at the intersection of the sociology of social movements and the sociology of race and ethnicity, the “ethnic” dimensions are revealed as a lens for understanding the general problems of group and identity formation and collective mobilization that lie at the heart of both areas.Presented at the 2016 meeting of the American Sociological Association. NOTE: The uploaded version is now a preprint of the 2017 published version, which is a substantial revision of the 2016 ASA version.

scholarly journals Understanding users Display-Name Consistency across Social Networks

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (5S3) ◽  
pp. 471-476
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Social Networking ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Personal Attributes ◽  
Media Content ◽  
Social Networking Services ◽  
Twitter User ◽  
The Social ◽  
Twitter Users

Online users create their profiles on numerous social platforms to get benefits of various types of social media content. During online profile creation, the user selects a username and feeds his/her personal details like name, location, email, etc. As different social networking services acquire common personal attributes of the same user and present them in a variety of formats. To understand the availability and similarity of personal attributes across various social networking services, we propose a method that uses the different distance measuring algorithms to determine the display-name similarity across social networks. From the experimental results, it is found that at least twenty percent GooglePlus-Facebook and Facebook-Twitter users select the same display name, while forty five percent Google and Twitter user select identical name across both the social networks.

Ideal Point Estimation in Political Hierarchies: A Framework and an Application to the US Executive Branch

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Acs
Keyword(s):  
Ideal Point ◽  
The United States ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Point Estimation ◽  
The Us ◽  
Political Hierarchy ◽  
Public Bureaucracy ◽  
Ideal Points ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Ideal

Abstract This article develops a procedure for estimating the ideal points of actors in a political hierarchy, such as a public bureaucracy. The procedure is based on a spatial auditing model and is motivated by the idea that while agents within a political hierarchy are typically segregated in different policy fiefdoms, they are bound to a common principal that can scrutinize their policy proposals through selective reviews, or audits. The theoretical model shows how a principal’s decision to audit an agent’s proposal can reveal both actors’ spatial preferences, despite the strategic nature of the interaction. Empirical identification of the ideal points comes from leveraging settings where elections replace principals over time, but not agents. Although the procedure is quite general, I provide an illustration using data on federal regulatory policymaking in the United States and recover ideal point estimates for presidents and agencies across three administrations.

scholarly journals Social Networks, Mass Publics, and Democratic Politics

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
American Political Science Review ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Political Networks ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mass Publics ◽  
Group Memberships

The study of social networks as they relate to mass political behavior has roots in foundational social scientific works (e.g., Lazarsfeld, et al. The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1944). Huckfeldt and Sprague ushered in the contemporary era of political networks research (e.g., “Networks in Context: The Social Flow of Political Information” in American Political Science Review 81.4 (1987): 1197–1216, and Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication: Information and Influence in an Election Campaign. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), picking up on the Columbia scholars’ early efforts to measure interpersonal influence and the consequences of group memberships in the United States. Drawing theoretical and conceptual distinctions between networks and contexts, Huckfeldt and Sprague popularized survey techniques for measuring individuals’ core discussion networks via name generators, and demonstrated relationships between individuals’ social networks and their opinions and perceptions. Subsequent works by these and other scholars have moved beyond community study designs, examining network effects in the areas of vote choice, attitude formation, and political participation. Major debates have focused on the extent to which individuals are exposed to disagreeable information via their social contacts (e.g., Mutz. Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2006); questions about causality (e.g., McClurg, et al. “Discussion Networks” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); and the identification of mechanisms of influence (e.g., Sinclair. The Social Citizen: Peer Networks and Political Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Scholars have studied the role of social networks in mass publics around the world (e.g., Gunther, et al. Voting in Old and New Democracies. New York: Routledge, 2016), and how family networks and processes of socialization shape political attitudes. Current work is documenting how factors like gender, personality, emotion, and geography facilitate or hinder social influence; how online and offline worlds intersect; and how scholars can better measure broader patterns of social exposure and interaction.

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