What do followers tell us about the Massachusetts State House?

We recently looked at who follows members of the New York State Legislature and what that might tell us about politics in the Empire State. Today, we’re heading up to Beacon Hill.

We’re going to be looking at one of Twitter’s core components - the follow.

When a user follows @JoeBiden on Twitter, that means they want to see the President’s tweets. When they follow @KamalaHarris, it means they want to see the Vice President’s tweets. If we see that one user follows both, we can conclude that both those accounts are interesting to the same user.

For just one user and just two accounts, that may not mean much. But if we could aggregate the data from all users who follow all accounts from a certain environment - like the members of the Massachusetts House and Senate - then we may be able to tease out some patterns. They may show us those who are similar in ideology or position, like, @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris, or geographically similar, like @RedSox and @Patriots. Or it may be something else that we only discover through looking at the data.

We looked at all users who followed a member of the State House and then saw which legislators had followers in common. This was a big data project - there were more than 160,000 users who follow at least one member of the Assembly or Senate and more than 500,000 follower-followed relationships. 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.

Senate and leadership are the way to rack up co-followers

Senate President Karen Spilka had the most overlaps with other legislators. The median legislator sees more than half of their followers also following Sen. Spilka.

It seems that there are two factors that lead to high co-followership scores, both of which apply to Sen. Spilka. Being a member of leadership is connected with a high co-followership - two of the three top Representatives are Speaker Mariano and Chairman of Ways and Means Michlewitz - and it also seems that being a Senator is also helpful. Seven of the top ten accounts for co-followership are Senators. This makes sense, as a Senator would share their district with four or more Representatives, and an engaged citizen may follow both their elected representatives.

Not simply about follower numbers

One possible confounding factor could be that not every legislator has the same number of followers. If you have a million followers and someone else only has a hundred - and you’re both drawing on the same pool of engaged citizens of the Commonwealth - then there is a good chance that most of their followers also follow your account.

Looking at the data, we found that there is indeed a strong relationship between the two. As the chart below shows, increasing your own followers rapidly increases how many you share with the median legislator. However, it’s not the only factor. There is quite a bit of spread, especially at higher numbers, where the data is heteroskedastic.

Individual relationships

From our initial exploration of the data, there does seem to be a correlation between legislators that are known to be connected to each other, in one way or another, and their co-followships.

Sen. Pat Jehlen, for example, has her highest House overlaps with Reps. Mike Connolly, Christine Barber, and Marjorie Decker, all of whom represent parts of Sen. Jehlen’s district. Rep. Liz Miranda’s top overlaps include many of the other members of the Boston delegation.

As for the other relationships, especially between individual legislators and who they have the greatest overlap with, we recommend that you explore the data in full and bring your own knowledge and context to what the numbers say.

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.

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).

You can sign up for free or, if you’d like to help us as we consider building features that help you get more out of Twitter and social media apps, you can take our political social media survey. Everyone who completes it will get a credit for one month of LegislataPRO.