The Impact of Twitter on Lawmakers’ Decisions

Organizations have used social media extensively to engage customers, but little is known if such engagement truly influences organizations’ decisions to make them closer to their customers. This paper studies this question in a unique context – the impact of U.S. Representatives’ Twitter engagement on their voting behavior in The Congress. In particular, we consider whether the adoption and frequent use of Twitter make Representatives to vote more in line with the political orientation of their constituents. We constructed a panel data for 445 Members of the 111th U.S. House of Representatives across a period of 24 months. We exploit the variation in joining Twitter across Representatives to identify the impact of joining Twitter on voting behavior. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we found that the adoption of Twitter makes Representatives to vote more in line with their constituents. That is, in districts where Representatives are more conservative than the constituent, Twitter adoption results in less conservative votes by Representatives. Similarly, in districts where Representatives are more liberal than the constituent, Twitter adoption results in less liberal votes by the Representatives. We also found evidence that Representatives who generate more contents on Twitter platform tend to vote closer to the political orientation of their constituents.