Do Politicians Talk about Politics? Assessing Online Communication Patterns of Brazilian Politicians

Abstract

Politicians need to decide how to communicate with their voters to build their reputations. This problem is especially complicated during important political events such as the elections when politicians must decide whether to confront and share their thoughts about controversial topics or to simply communicate non-political messages. Aware of these communication behaviors, our goal is to analyze how politicians present themselves in the digital environment and how the public reacts to them. We also investigate whether they change their communication and if there is a typical pattern that is chosen by the majority of politicians over time. To address these problems, we collected 751,117 public tweets of 692 Brazilian deputies from October 2013 to October 2015. Furthermore, we propose a methodology for identifying Twitter messages about political issues at a large scale. We use this methodology to characterize the communication behavior of Brazilian congresspeople in a 2-year span. We found that Brazilian congresspeople changed their communication behavior as the election approached and as they were elected or not. Moreover, we showed that although most of the politicians increased the number of non-political messages during elections, the audience tends to favorite and retweet political messages more.