A Penny for Your Tweets: Campaign Contributions and Capitol Hill Microblogs

Authors

  • Tae Yano Carnegie Mellon University
  • Dani Yogatama Carnegie Mellon University
  • Noah Smith Carnegie Mellon University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v7i1.14455

Keywords:

Text Driven Prediction, Text Regression, Topic Model, Congress, Micorblogs, User Generated Text

Abstract

Who influences a politician’s public statements? In this paper, we explore one plausible explanation: that financial incentives from campaign contributors affect what politicians say. Based on this idea, we design text-driven models  for campaign contribution profile prediction. Using a large corpus of public microblog messages by members of the U.S. Congress, we find evidence for such an association, at the level of contributing industries. We find complementary strengths in a simple model (which has better predictive accuracy) and a more complex model (which gives a more intuitive, human-interpretable explanation).

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Published

2021-08-03

How to Cite

Yano, T., Yogatama, D., & Smith, N. (2021). A Penny for Your Tweets: Campaign Contributions and Capitol Hill Microblogs. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 7(1), 737-740. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v7i1.14455