Tweeting is Leading

Reviews / Votes

Russell demonstrates how legislators use the freedom of social media to present themselves in ways that reveal their priorities. Far from a homogeneous lot, members of the U.S. Senate in some cases take to Twitter to communicate their concern for local issues back home while others use it to engage in partisan combat in Washington. The three types of rhetorical styles that Russell identifies through a detailed analysis of tweets provide a useful window in the ways that legislators approach their jobs. * Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of Personal Roots of Representation * Russell provides an impressive examination of Congress's most important new representational tool: social media. Analyzing an original dataset of more than 180,000 tweets, this book shows that senators carefully develop 'digital home styles' to explain their activity in Washington. Importantly, Russell reveals that social media not only provides great insight into senators' representational activities, but it also shapes how modern lawmakers work to represent their constituents. * James M. Curry, University of Utah * Tweeting is Leading provides a comprehensive study of the home styles of U.S. senators in the digital age. Annelise Russell uses an extraordinary dataset of Tweets to identify three strands of self-presentation: policy wonk, constituent service, and partisan warrior. She then explains why individual senators gravitate toward one style or another, using a blend of statistical analysis and colorful examples. * Gregory Koger, University of Miami * In this rich, insightful study, Russell analyzes an impressive original dataset of U.S. senators' Twitter activity. We learn that most senators style themselves as 'policy wonks,' whereas only a minority focus primarily on local and constituency issues. Contrary to conventional wisdom, only a small share (about 10%) of senators' tweets drive a partisan narrative. Russell illuminates many other patterns in senators' image-making. The result is a nuanced, often surprising window into representation in the contemporary party polarized Senate. * Frances Lee, Princeton University * Tweeting is Leading forges a new frontier in how we study U.S. Senate representation in terms of legislative style, partisan polarization, and policy accomplishments. Russell demonstrates how social media, measured by over 180,000 tweets sent by U.S. Senators, has become a substantive means of direct communication between constituents and their elected officials. This book provides original insight into the choices individual Senators make to be partisan and nationally focused, or bipartisan and focused on their state's more local needs and concerns. It replaces our outdated notion of cheap talk with the concept of a personalized rhetorical agenda which serves as new innovation in the way that Senators shape their reputation among their colleagues, the media, interest groups, state political actors, and constituents. Anyone who wants to understand Senate representation in the 21st century should read this book. * Wendy J. Schiller-Kalunian, Brown University * In this interesting and thoughtful book, Annelise Russell explores legislative representation from a new angle. By investigating how senators' messaging strategies on social media shape their reputations among their constituents and the expectations those constituents have of them, Russell demonstrates convincingly that their use of Twitter is more than just "cheap talk." Instead, senators effectively manage competing demands and competing priorities as they engage in the process of representation. * Tracy Sulkin, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign *