Thesis Summary

Social Identity, Group Representation, and Unequal Responsiveness in the US and UK

Zachary Dickson

Hello there,

  • In this presentation, I’ll highlight some of the key aspects of my thesis, including:
    • Format:
      • summary and substance of the four separate chapters
    • Methods/Data:
      • details of the method used throughout most of the thesis
      • political communication & elites’ online behavior
    • Key findings:
      • high-level substantive conclusions
      • empirical and methodological

Agenda-Setting and MPs’ Responsiveness Online

  • Key questions:
    • Are UK MPs more responsive to different political groups on social media?
    • To which of the following groups – NGOs, the media and corporations – are MPs most responsive?
  • Method:
    • Dynamic measure of daily attention to different salient issues (i.e. economy, health etc.)
    • Vector autoregression models to capture the effects of shifts in attention
  • Key findings:
    • Corporations foreshadow the issue attention of Labour and Conservative MPs
    • NGOs have almost no ability to set the attention of MPs online
    • Media leads the attention of all actors on many issues (McCombs and Shaw 1972)

Social Class and Group Representation in Britain

  • Key questions:
    • Do MPs’ educational backgrounds shape representation?
    • How does educational socialisation compare to occupational socialisation?
  • Literature:
  • Data:
    • Dynamic issue attention of UK MPs using social media and parliamentary speeches
    • Public issue priorities by MII surveys according to social grade
  • Key findings
    • Oxbridge MPs give greater attention to the priorities of middle class voters
    • The “responsiveness gap” is similar when conditioning on education as with occupation in the UK

Group Representation and the Gender Divide

  • Key questions:
    • Does gender shape the issues US and UK representatives emphasise online?
    • If so, are women representatives more responsive to women constituents? Country differences?
  • Literature:
  • Data:
    • US & UK representatives’ online messages on Twitter
    • Public priorities – US & UK MII surveys by gender
  • Key findings
    • Women representatives are more responsive in both countries to issues prioritised by the national public
    • Women MPs in the UK prioritise women constituents, while women MCs in the US prioritise the national public

The Limits of Group Loyalty in Congress

  • Key questions:
    • How far will elites go to remain loyal to their group identities?
    • Does COVID-19 infection cause US MCs to reduce opposition to COVID-19 policies?
  • Literature:
  • Method:
    • US legislators’ revealed preferences on COVID-19 policies
    • NLP/Machine learning classification
  • Key findings:
    • COVID-19 causes legislators to reduce their opposition to COVID-19 (revealed preferences)
    • Potential mechanisms – strategic shift & perceptions of danger

Methods

Measuring MPs’ attention using social media data drawing

  • Issue attention as a proportion of attention to all issues (Baumgartner and Jones 2010)
  • Supervised vs. unsupervised methods (Mikolov et al. 2013)
  • Semi-supervised topic modelling

    • Methods, Cont’d

    Measuring public issue priorities using multiple surveys drawing

  • Repeated public surveys asking about MII (YouGov 2021)
  • Salience as percentage of population identifying an issue as the most important1

    • Tying everything together

    • Expanding the concept of descriptive representation
      • group identity shapes human behaviour (Tajfel and Turner 1982)
      • near infinite overlapping and intersecting identities
    • Social media as a lens into society
      • unprecedented study of elites
      • elites’ online behaviour is political behaviour
      • voters inform their opinions through elites’ social media behaviour (Giger et al. 2021)

    References

    Anzia, Sarah F, and Christopher R Berry. 2011. “The Jackie (and Jill) Robinson effect: Why do Congresswomen outperform Congressmen?” American Journal of Political Science 55 (3): 478–93.
    Baumgartner, Frank R, and Bryan D Jones. 2010. Agendas and Instability in American Politics. University of Chicago Press.
    Bisgaard, Martin. 2015. “Bias Will Find a Way: Economic Perceptions, Attributions of Blame, and Partisan-Motivated Reasoning During Crisis.” The Journal of Politics 77 (3): 849–60.
    Carnes, Nicholas, and Noam Lupa. 2015. “Rethinking the Comparative Perspective on Class and Representation: Evidence from Latin America.” American Journal of Political Science 59 (1): 1–18.
    Giger, Nathalie, Stefanie Bailer, Adrian Sutter, and Tomas Turner-Zwinkels. 2021. “Policy or person? What voters want from their representatives on Twitter.” Electoral Studies 74 (December): 1–9.
    McCombs, Maxwell E, and Donald L Shaw. 1972. “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media.” Public Opinion Quarterly 36 (2): 176–87.
    Mikolov, Tomas, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg S. Corrado, and Jeff Dean. 2013. “Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality.” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26.
    O’Grady, Tom. 2019. “Careerists Versus CoalMiners: Welfare Reforms and the Substantive Representation of Social Groups in the British Labour Party.” Comparative Political Studies 52 (4): 544–78.
    Schakel, Wouter, and Daphne Van Der Pas. 2021. “Degrees of influence: Educational inequality in policy representation.” European Journal of Political Research 60: 418–37.
    Taber, Charles S, and Milton Lodge. 2006. “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs.” American Journal of Political Science 50 (3): 755–69.
    Tajfel, Henri, and John C Turner. 1982. “Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations.” Annual Review of Psychology 33 (1): 1–39.
    Thomsen, Danielle M, and Bailey K Sanders. 2020. “Gender Differences in Legislator Responsiveness.” Perspectives on Politics 18 (4): 1017–30.
    YouGov. 2021. “The most important issues facing the country.” https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/the-most-important-issues-facing-the-country.

    Thank you!


    If you have any question about my research or want to chat further, don’t hesitate to get in contact via email () or on twitter (@sachary_)



    This presentation is available online at: https://z-dickson.github.io/research

    https://z-dickson.github.io/