The National Network of U.S. State Legislators on Twitter

Networks among legislators shape politics and policymaking within legislative institutions. In past work on legislative networks, the ties between legislators have been defined on those who serve in the same legislature or chamber. Online information networks, which have been found to play important roles in legislative communication at the national level, are not bounded by individual legislative bodies. We collect original data for over four thousand U.S. state legislators and study patterns of connection among them on Twitter. We look at three types of Twitter networks---follower, retweets, and mentions. We describe these networks and estimate the relationships between ties and salient attributes of legislators. We find that networks are organized largely along geographic and partisan lines and that identity attributes---namely gender and race---exhibit strong associations with the formation of ties.立法者间的社交网络对立法机构内部的政治运作与政策制定具有关键塑造作用。既往关于立法网络的研究中，立法者间的联结均以同属某一立法机关或议院的成员作为界定依据。而此前被证实对国家级立法沟通发挥重要作用的线上信息网络，却不受单一立法机构的边界限制。本研究收集了四千余名美国州级立法者的一手原始数据，针对其在推特（Twitter）平台上的联结模式展开研究。本次研究聚焦三类推特网络：关注关系、转推关系与提及关系。我们先对这三类网络进行描述性分析，随后评估了立法者间的联结与其显著属性之间的关联。研究结果表明，此类网络大体上按照地理区域与党派立场形成结构，而身份属性——具体为性别与种族——与联结的建立存在显著关联。