Electronic Homestyle: Tweeting Ideology

Abstract: Ideal points are central to the study of political partisanship and an essential component to our understanding of legislative and electoral behavior. We employ automated text analysis on tweets from Members of Congress to estimate their ideal points using Naive Bayes classification and Support Vector Machine classification. We extend these tools to estimate the proportion of partisan speech used in each legislator’s tweets. We demonstrate an association between these measurements, existing ideal point measurements, and district ideology.