A penny for your tweets: Campaign contributions and capitol hill microblogs

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). Copyright © 2013, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.