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Friday, September 12, 2014

Bond's Paper on Facebook and Ideology Accepted in American Political Science Review

Robert Bond's paper on the use of Facebook in Estimating Ideology has been accepted for publication by the American Political Science Review. Details are below. Congrats Robert!

TITLE: Quantifying Social Media’s Political Space: Estimating Ideology from Publicly Revealed Preferences on Facebook
AUTHORS: Robert Bond and Solomon Messing
Robert BondABSTRACT:  We demonstrate that social media data represent a useful resource for testing models of legislative and individual-level political behavior and attitudes. First, we develop a model to estimate the ideology of politicians and their supporters using social media data on individual citizens’ endorsements of political figures. Our measure allows us to place politicians and more than 6 million citizens who are active in social media on the same metric. We validate the ideological estimates that result from the scaling process by showing they correlate highly with existing measures of ideology from Congress, and with individual-level self- reported political views. Finally, we use these measures to study the relationship between ideology and age, social relationships and ideology, and the relationship between friend ideology and turnout.

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