Digital soapboxes Analyzing Twitter politics across 26 countries

In the last decade, the micro-blogging social media platform Twitter, has become a central point of research in many academic fields. This dissertation - Digital Soapboxes: Analyzing Twitter politics across 26 countries - highlights the similarities and differences in the behaviour of parliamentarians on Twitter across different countries, as well as the supra-national European Parliament. Motivated by a lack of comparable data, the Twitter Parliamentarian database was built, which gathered the public interactions of incumbent parliamentarians in 26 countries, as well as the supra-national European Parliament.
The dissertation looks at how Twitter data can be used as part of a comparative, computational approach to studying political communication. It used tools from (visual) network analysis and text mining to better understand the Twitter behaviour of parliamentarians. From the networks, it was found that there is a relationship between the network structure and the electoral system. It was also found that Members of European Parliament interact with their fellow parliamentarians far more than their national parliamentarians. Lastly, a case study of the Brexit in the United Kingdom showed that the underlying moral arguments justifying the referendum differed per party.
Overall, the dissertation used computational methods to contribute to the body of knowledge about the way parliamentarians use Twitter to communicate amongst one another, as well as towards their constituents, through the construction and public provision of the Twitter Parliamentarian Database.