Guest Post: Annelise Russell on her new book, Tweeting is Leading: How Senators Communicate and Represent in the Age of Twitter
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Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley once took to Twitter to let people know that the “Windsor Heights Dairy Queen is a good place for u kno what.” Well, the internet had some suggestions!
Grassley is a seven-term senator and has previously served as chairman on some of the U.S. Senate’s most powerful committees, but what most people know about him has nothing to do with his knowledge of policy. He is known for his representation on Twitter, his public battles with the History Channel, and offering commentary on dead deer and “pidgins.” Grassley continues to paint himself as the folksy Iowa dude — returning to Dairy Queen in September 2021 for a little “u kno what” — and curating his hometown reputation.
Not every senator has taken to Twitter the way Grassley has, but his digital presence illustrates just how fundamental Twitter has become to representation in Congress.
Social media have changed the business of representation and lawmaker reputation-building. My new book, Tweeting is Leading: How Senators Communicate and Represent in the Age of Twitter (Oxford University Press) examines the U.S. Senate to reveal key changes in the constituent-driven nature of political communication. I offer a critical analysis of senators’ communication on Twitter, the forces that shape it, and the political agendas that result. Using a data set of more than 180,000 senator tweets, the book explains how today’s legislators communicate their priorities and make strategic choices incentivized by their constituencies and personal political goals.
What lawmakers say online isn’t just “cheap talk.” Twitter is a high-stakes game. Senators and their staff strategically communicate images that reflect their unique political personas. The book shows how political reputations are built when the electorate is polarized and nationalized. Above all, senators have to decide what they want to be known for. They craft communications that prioritize legislation, constituent service, and party politics in ways that they hope meet the interests of their constituencies and foster promising electoral returns.
Senators’ communicated, public priorities—what I term their rhetorical agendas—are necessary for understanding how they link their carefully crafted public images with potential voters. The concept of rhetorical agendas rethinks what political scientists know about representation. Today, institutional and political constraints on congressional communication are not as powerful as they once were. Social media have granted lawmakers messaging platforms where individual discretion is high, the relative costs are low, and someone is always watching. Senators now get to choose what kind of representative they want to present themselves as, and my data reveal three distinct styles—the policy wonk, the constituent servant, and the partisan warrior. I show that the cultivation of these styles depends on a senator’s relationship to her constituency and the makeup of that constituency. While previous studies of legislative behavior often assumed that institutional constraints shape politicians’ decision-making, I show empirically how senators now use social media to self-constrain their communication and curate different styles of representation that match the expectations of their different constituencies.
Tweeting is Leading therefore establishes a new perspective on congressional communication—one that explains variation in rhetorical styles of representation by focusing on Twitter’s role in aggregating attention. The concept of rhetorical agendas also offers a generalizable framework for thinking more broadly about political representatives’ public relations activities. In doing so, it tackles important questions about how legislators build distinctive reputations now that there are sophisticated tools for them to construct their own narratives of representation while connecting with constituents.
Senators’ rhetorical agendas on Twitter are a further manifestation of how they seek to build reputations that reflect the expectations of their constituents. The contemporary senator crafts a rhetorical agenda on Twitter to convey her priorities as a representative. But she also makes substantive connections with constituents and does so in ways that can reshape her policy priorities.
Tweeting is Leading: How Senators Communicate and Represent in the Age of Twitter is available now from Oxford University Press, in its Studies in Digital Politics series.
