From Offline Politics to Online Action: Social Media Adoption and Communication by the Legislators, Lobbyists, and Business Groups of Maine

In the study of social media in sub-national politics, offline-bounded methods offer an attractive alternative to the current emphasis on content search. When cases are selected according to content, analysis suffers from nebulous content boundaries, reliance on samples instead of populations, missing relationship data, and a lack of distinction between members of different sets and groups. Sub-national political entities, in contrast, typically have clear and substantive boundaries set by formal membership rules in the offline environment. These features make questions of adoption and interconnection more feasible to address. This chapter makes use of the Twitter list feature and data-mining capabilities of R to understand social media adoption, in-group interaction, and between-group intersection among legislators, lobbyists, and business groups in the American state of Maine. We find that Twitter adopters are distinguished from non-adopters to varying degrees according to offline characteristics. Although rates of Twitter adoption are similar for all three groups, only Maine legislators appear to form an internal community of Twitter interaction. Maine lobbyists and business groups, by contrast, maintain political connection through communication with outsiders.