Chicago Politicians on Twitter

This paper uses data from 1,042 tweets posted by or mentioning Chicago Aldermen or
Mayor Rahm Emanuel to examine how Chicago politicians use social media. Twitter provides a
public communication medium in which constituents and their representatives can have two-way
conversations that others can witness and record, and we used qualitative and social network
methods to examine conversations between Chicagoans and representatives in city government.
We coded the contents of each tweet over the two-week time period (e.g., official business,
fundraising) and created representations of the social networks created by the users’ following
behaviors. These networks indicate who receives politicians’ tweets and help identify the
audiences for political messaging in social media. Our analysis indicates that Chicago’s
Aldermen and Mayor use Twitter for social conversations more often than political ones, and
that only a small number of Aldermen dominate the resulting conversation networks.