What do followers tell us about the NY State Legislature?
We recently looked at who New York City councilmembers and NY State Legislators follow on Twitter, to get a sense of whose voices NY’s elected officials are most likely to see when they open the app.
Today, we’re looking at who follows state legislators and we’re diving into a few areas.
Who are the most followed legislators?
Who are the biggest accounts following each legislator?
How much overlap is there between each legislator’s followers and every other legislator’s?
This was a big data project - there were more than 400,000 users who follow at least one member of the Assembly or Senate and more than 1 million unique follower-followed relationships. So to handle it all, we have a write up of the findings here and a web app to explore the data. You can get there by clicking the button below.
Our findings
Back from checking out the data yourself? Okay, let’s dive into what we found.
Having high follower numbers are correlated with being on the left of the Democratic Party and/or running for higher office. The Senate Majority Leader and Assembly Speaker are in fact only 7th and 9th on the most followed list. The numbers for Assemblymember Niou are remarkable, less than 10,000 followers away from Gov. Kathy Hochul’s campaign account number of 74,395, though, in fairness, the official governor’s account has 232k. (METHODOLOGY NOTE: Since some legislators have both official and personal/campaign accounts, we used whichever account was suggested first when searching for them. If you think we should change the account used, let us know).
Not a lot of celebrities
We also looked at who, among the legislators’ followers, had the highest follower counts. We weren’t sure who to expect, but if celebrities followed state legislators, it could easily have been accounts with millions of followers who might retweet legislator’s statements.
A different picture emerged when we ran the data, however. It seemed that many of the most-followed followers were other elected officials, like Sen. Schumer and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, and other government-relevant accounts, like the NY Attorney General and the NYC Police Benevolent Association.
However, there were some celebrities in there, like John Cena following Kevin Byrne, Sarah Silverman following Phara Souffrant Forrest, and Ben Stiller following Andrew Gounardes.
Shared followerships
About half of all users who follow a member of the State Legislature only follow that one member. But those that do follow multiple members give us a sense of how closely connected different legislators are, at least in the minds of Twitter users.
We can measure how many of one legislators followers also follow another legislator. So, for example, if everyone who followed @CarlHeastie also followed @AndreaSCousins, that would tell us that there was something tying those two together in the minds of Twitter users, who couldn’t follow one without also clicking to the other.
The average overlap between any two legislators is 11% of their followers. So if you see in the app that two legislators share more than 11%, it may means that the users see them as more connected than average.
As it turns out, the Speaker shares about half of his followers with the Majority Leader and she, 46% with him, so it does seem that many users follow the leaders as a package. And since both of them are among the most shared with for other legislators, it seems that if a Twitter user is going to follow a member of the State Legislature, then they are also likely to follow the leadership.
Since this is the first time we’ve ever done this kind of research, we encourage you to explore the data yourself or reach out to us if you want to collaborate on further research to draw more conclusions.
A mixed network
We also put the shared follower connections through a network analysis. By imaging that each shared follower is a connection between two legislators, we can map out the entire network according to what all the connections reveal, with each legislator represented as a dot, and their proximity to each other on the graphic representing how close they are in the network.
It shows us a network where there are no clear groupings, either by party or other type of division. If, for example, only one set of users followed all Republican accounts, and another followed all Democratic accounts, we would expect the below graphic to have two distinct clumps of dots. Instead, they are mixed. You can see that there are subgroupings - for example, there are a handful of Democratic accounts in the lower right that are outside of the main group and connected to each other. But, overall, the world of users following state legislators on Twitter is not so clearly divided as we might think. With the average legislator sharing 11% of their followers with another legislator, it shows that the divides within the network is not absolute, but gradations of connection that you can explore in the data yourself.
A plug for Legislata
One reason we conduct research into Twitter is that it’s one of the ways people in politics keep up with what’s happening. But, as we all know, it’s not real life. It has its own tendencies and skews that are fine for social media, and suboptimal if you’re seeking information for professional use.
Legislata helps you stay on top of the information that underpins your political world. Manage your own information, stay alerted with what’s happening in your networks, and get your message out - no JPGs of PDFs required. You can join request an invite to our New York community that has just launched here.
With LegislataPRO, you can also turn your inbox into a hub of productivity (and is an ideal solution for elected officials inundated by constituent communications). Sign up for a free account or schedule a demo to learn more.