Digital Home Style

• In Event: Experiments in Representation

Abstract

Fenno's seminal and influential work introduced the concept of 'Home Style' to delineate how politicians communicated with their constituency to elicit trust and ensure reelection. His definition encompassed the way they presented themselves, how they were allocating resources to their constituency, and the interpretation they were offering, in press releases and rallies, of the activities in Washington. All these elements combined into the signal that the politicians was delivering to its constituency.
We propose to update this definition by exploring experimentally the signal that politicians give to their constituency online on social media. In the last year social media have emerged as a prominent mean of political communication. In the Internet era, MCs can communicate continuously with their constituency, and, crucially, they can communicate in new ways, and with new tools. How does their presentation on social media affects the way voters appraise them? And how these effects are moderated by the level of digital literacy?
We propose to answer these questions by implementing a visual conjoint experiment in which we create artificial Twitter profiles varying them in the identity of the profile holder (age, race, and gender), the content of the tweet (local vs national politics and style), and the intensity of feedback received. We will present artificially combined Twitter profiles of local politicians to co-partisan respondents that will evaluate them both in their willingness to support the politicians and in their willingness to follow the profile, therefore providing evidence on both the appeal of the profile and the politician. We will explore how these outcome vary with different categories of voters, and especially different generations. The result from this study will provide additional insight on the impact of social media on politics, and the impact of politicians communication online.

Authors

• Alessandro Vecchiato, Stanford University

• Kevin Munger, Pennsylvania State University