The Sociopolitical Connections of Interest Groups

• In Event: Political Organizations Online and in Print

Abstract

Interest groups are central in shaping public issue debates and advancing policy-agendas. Increasingly, politics and related activities take place on social media platforms; yet in these studies, interest groups are often overlooked. How are interest groups using these platforms and engaging with other groups online? I find that interest group networks use social platforms for informational exchanges and form connections to enhance their engagement with the public, increase their visibility and validity, and gain symbolic representational benefits from follower ties. This creates a sociopolitical coalition of interest groups based on strategic, social, political and informational decisions to follow other interest group organizational accounts on social media. Using a unique dataset of more than 130,000 interest group Twitter accounts, I use a variety of network methods to assess the sociopolitical aspects of interest groups. These methods include embedding representation models, community detection, similarity measures and exponential random graph models that explain ties among interest groups and how interest groups that participate in offline coalitions that generate their online networks.

Author

• Laura Moses, The Ohio State University