Shared contexts, shared background, shared values – Homophily in the Finnish parliament members’ social networks on Twitter

Abstract

<p>While <a title="Learn more about Twitter" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/twitter"><u>Twitter</u></a> has become an essential part of daily politics across Western countries, little research has focused on origins of politicians’ social circles on social media. This paper contributes to how structural, ideological and <a title="Learn more about Contextual Factors" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/contextual-factors"><u>contextual factors</u></a> affect tie formation between parliamentarians’ Twitter <a title="Learn more about Network" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/network"><u>networks</u></a>. The study focuses on Finland, where over 80 percent of parliamentarians are using the platform. For empirical analysis, we first extracted parliamentarians’ followee network connections from their Twitter accounts (36 294 nodes and 113 108 edges) and combined it with data from a national <a title="Learn more about Elections" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/elections"><u>voting</u></a> advice application, which includes <a title="Learn more about Information" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/information"><u>information</u></a> regarding parliamentarians' societal position and <a title="Learn more about Opinion" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/opinion"><u>opinions</u></a> regarding social, cultural and <a title="Learn more about Economics" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/economics"><u>economic</u></a> issues. According to the explanatory analysis, we found that connections between parliamentarians and the share of mutual followees are clearly based on matching values, similar background and shared contextual factors. Additionally, we found that <a title="Learn more about Shared Context" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/shared-context"><u>shared context</u></a> had strong confounding effects on the function of value homophily in relations and shared networks between Finnish parliamentarians.<br /></p>