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

ABSTRACT:  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.

Song has Sole-Author Paper with Meta-Analayis of ERGM Results Accepted in Journal of Communication

Congratulations to Hyunjin Song, who recently had a sole-authored paper accepted for publication in Journal of Communication. The manuscript, "Uncovering the Structural Underpinnings of Political Discussion Networks: Evidence from an Exponential Random Graph Model," is one of the first such analyses published in communication, and almost certainly the first published that integrates 25 such analyses using meta-analysis techniques. Congrats Jin!

Former COPS Member Lindsay Hoffman Quoted in New York Times

A shout out to founding COPS member Lindsay Hoffman, now associate professor at the University of Delaware, who was quoted today in an article in the New York Times on the role of Facebook in political campaigns.