Racial Representation and Cyber-Home Style in the Nascent Trump Era

• In Event: Race, Representation, and Institutions

Abstract

Despite scholarly interest in how politicians strategically leverage social media to message the public, there remains a dearth of research on how black members of Congress leverage social media and the consequences of said strategies for interest representation. Given debates about the relationship between legislative style and demographic characteristics -- at the level of individual legislator and at the district level, the dearth of specific studies raises questions about racial representation in cyberspace and provides new opportunities to broaden the extant literatures on Congress, on ethnoracial politics, and on political communication. Using data that tracks the Facebook posts of members of Congress during the 114th and 115th sessions, as well as data from the 2016 and 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we explore whether Black legislators, in comparison, to their White and Latino counterparts, engage in messaging emphasizing local politics or national issues. We also explore the individual and combined effects of ethnoracial identity, partisanship, district support for the Democratic presidential candidate, and members ideology on the proportion of posts opposing or supporting the president. We utilize regression analysis to model our data, including using a tobit model to account for the censured nature of one of our dependent variables. We find ethnoracial differences in how members of Congress leveraged social media in the 114th and 115th session, and that some Black legislators engaged in symbolic representation at higher rates than comparable counterparts. We also find that Black representation in cyberspace was not limited to local district issues, and that some Black legislators were especially responsive to the end of the Obama Presidency and the beginning of the Trump Presidency. We examine how legislators’ choice of messaging influenced approval of Black representatives and vote choice. Our findings both expand upon and challenge previous work examining how and why representatives leverage social media platforms to speak to and for constituents beyond their district (e.g., Tillery (2019) and Harden and Clark (2016)). We contend that political context of the two aforementioned presidencies helped frame the tone and character of how Black representatives engaged in cyber representation -- namely, that Black representatives attempted to showcase in cyberspace their hillstyle and homestyle to meet the very real expectations of Black constituents that they signal their position on the agendas of the two presidents. We further contend that racial representation in cyberspace has implications beyond these online platforms.

Authors

• Tyson D. King-Meadows, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

• Jamil Shatema Scott, Georgetown University