Issue Ownership, Salience, Agendas & Public Policy on Twitter

(Status: Submitted) George Mendez-04/29/2015-PSC 394

Abstract:

Following the theories of Issue Ownership, Issue Salience and literature on

agenda-setting among others, I used Twitter as a primary data resource to measure to what extent

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, other Senators, the President and the party organizations mention

certain issues, when they raise them and reasons for which they might have raised them. I looked

at correlations and draw conclusions from their behavior on Twitter. I used the internal search

engine provided by Twitter to count the number of Tweets containing a certain keyword for each

of the owned issues and compiled them into an Excel sheet and compared the data through line

graphs. My observations are that Senators evidently choose a select few consensus issues that are

relatable to personal agendas and limit the scope of issues discussed to a small area of focus in

the issue and redirect some of these consensus issues towards doing so. What this means is that

these actors could mention a consensus issue in a Tweet but only focus on a small area to suit

their agendas and specialties. Health care and Medicare directed towards the Affordable Care

Act and the economy and jobs directed towards the Keystone Pipeline are examples of this.

Democrats and Republicans as party organizations each also have priorities and they direct their

owned consensus issues towards supporting or attacking the President, creating common peaks

of activity on Twitter. Politicians also engage in agenda-setting behavior to help steer brief

periods of change in policy direction. When we look at Twitter activity, there are correlations

between heightened peaks of activity and current legislation. Major disasters and related events

also have a noticeable effect.

Introduction:

Social media is a new and mostly unexplored source of data since the creation of the

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Internet as we know it today, and everyone involved in the field of politics has taken to it to as a

means of quickly and directly connecting with their constituents. This is a new, inexpensive and

rapid method of communication for both parties to utilize. As politicians increasingly look to

Twitter to voice their policy stances and priorities and reach out to the general public, valuable

analysis is waiting to happen to help political scientists understand theories and hypotheses in the

modern age.

However what exactly goes into the platforms of future candidates and when the issues

will be brought up is still unknown. The theories of Issue Ownership and Issue Salience can help

us hypothesize to a certain extent. In addition to this, key pieces of legislation and politicians’

specializations on certain consensus issues that are on their respective agendas heighten activity

and create bursts of activity. Present literature also supports the idea of natural disasters and

terrorist attacks affecting future public policy changes and there is evidence to support

heightened Twitter activity as a result of such events.

Thus, I have chosen to explore evidence of these theories on Twitter on several Senator’s

accounts, the President and both parties. I chose specific keywords relative to consensus issues

and counted these Tweets for 16 of these issues. I used the data gained through Twitter to

analyze correlations and differences in these. My findings show in the case of Senator Kirsten

Gillibrand, she specializes in mentioning women in the military, protection for crimes against

women and combating sexual assault in higher education. I found that several of these issues are

focused in order to promote other, more specialized interests each actor is more advantaged at

debating and raising the salience of the issue in the public eye. Examples include Senator

Gillibrand and equality for women, or the GOP attacking the Affordable Care Act in as many

ways as possible across several consensus issues.

Theories of Issue Ownership and Issue Salience are useful for understanding the

sorts of issues debated in election versus non-election years and which ones are consistently

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discussed over time. This allows us to understand tendencies each party has and the direction of

future public policy. If we look at the variation of issues between election and non-election

years, we can understand changes to a certain extent.

Literature Review:

John Petrocik introduced the idea of issue ownership in his 1996 article Issue Ownership

in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study. The theory of Issue Ownership entails

candidates focusing on issues which they are expected to have an advantage emphasizing. This

implies that voters support candidates with party and performance reputations of competence in

handling issues the voter is concerned about. The term “Handling” is used here, referring to

candidate’s abilities to resolve problem concerns of voters through policy and program interests,

produced by a history of attention and initiative on their part. What Petrocik found is that

candidates have patterns of emphasizing concerns of voters and that election outcomes follow

from this. He states the main difference among elections and their issue focuses are the problem

concerns and not the policy attitudes of the voters. Petrocik believes ownership is conferred by

the incumbent’s record and party constituency. He identifies it as a long term process and is

subject to change. He also believes the linkage between the party’s issue priorities and

constituent’s focuses are strong. The foundations are more generalized and colloquial in nature

as he goes on to name different social bases (religion, unionized, educated, geographical

location) and links it to the inherent ideological divisions of the two-party system.

However Patrick J. Egan has a different take on issue ownership in his 2013 book,

Partisan Priorities: How Issue Ownership Drives and Distorts American Politics. In the interest

of brevity, I shall summarize: Egan’s findings show issue ownership is most clearly defined as:

“the long-term positive associations between political parties and particular consensus issues in

the public’s mind- association created and reinforced by the parties’ commitments to prioritizing

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these issues with government spending and lawmaking.” He argues that each party does not

show superior performance or deliver popular policies on issues they “own.” Rather, he

believes they simply prioritize these issues when they are in power. Politicians actually tend to

ignore voter’s preferences and often take measures to keep elected officials in line with the

party’s agenda, as in the case of Democratic Reps. Holden and Altmire of Pennsylvania

following opposition to the Affordable Care Act. This modern day purge could lead to evidence

of Egan’s hypothesis of the distortion of American politics due to this tendency.

Egan introduces the idea of consensus issues with two vignettes about the adaptation of

lowering income taxes into the Republican party’s platform in the 1970s and the culmination of

Democratic efforts towards universal health care beginning with Truman and ending with the

implementation of the ACA in 2010. Consensus issues in their simplest form are issues

that all Americans want to see addressed as a goal, the only debate is over how we eventually

achieve that goal. All else being equal, all Americans want to see improved health care and

lowered taxes and only disagree about the policies enacted, performance and prioritization of

these issues. This extends out to the sixteen issues mentioned in Egan’s tables and that I have

acquired and complied data on for the purposes of this paper. One example of a non-consensus

issue would be abortion, as the country is fiercely divided on the end goal of legislation related to

abortion, which would either be the allowance or denial of in all or some cases.

Thus consensus issues researched here are not debated on an end-goal basis but rather the

prioritization of which goals, the performance in pursuit of those goals and policies best suited to

carrying out these goals. In addition, the scopes of these hypotheses are limited to consensus

goals only and not to other goals like universal gay rights or addressing income inequality itself.

Thus if either party prioritizes a certain issue during an election year, we should evidence of

increased activity during that time. If the Issue Ownership theory holds true, I should expect to

see a stark contrast on the variation of when certain issues are mentioned and to what amount.

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In Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones’s Agendas and Instability in American

Politics, the claim is made that public policy is not gradual and incremental, but disjoint and

episodic. Long and stable periods experience bursts of frenetic policy activity. They believe

policymaking is determined by specialists, in federal agencies, interested parties and groups

and so on. “As government leaders shift their attention from one problem to the next, policy

entrepreneurs responsible for administering programs argue that their program represents the

best solution to the new problem, even though originally it may have had no relationship to that

problem.” “When an issue receives sufficient attention, it often can no longer be confined to

subsystems. Then parties may be drawn to it because it has the potential of conveying electoral

advantage.” In reference to a quote by Giandomenico Majone on the evolution of how

Americans viewed poverty over time, Baumgartner and Jones said “As the image of the issue

changed from that of a private misfortune to a public problem amenable to government solutions,

the issue rose high on the government agenda.”These sixteen issues have all risen in the public

eye as being issues that the federal government in some way has a part in dealing with.

They bring up the idea of policy monopolies, “structural arrangements that are supported

by powerful ideas.”

“Policy entrepreneurs take advantage of favorable public attention and quickly move to ensure a quick assignment by government officials to an encouraging institutional venue. In the absence of opposition to new policy ideas, policy entrepreneurs can move swiftly to manipulate elite and mass opinions towards a surge of enthusiasm for the new policy. The desired outcome is of course, a policy monopoly; the political weapons are concerted promotional campaigns.”

“When issues reach the public agenda on a wave of popular enthusiasm, conditions are at their

best for the construction of a new policy subsystem.” They also discuss their decay and why

some monopolies do not form. Rather than be in continuous conflict, they believe these groups

involved retreat into areas where their influence is uncontested. This is appealing because

then they can make the claim “outsiders” are not qualified and these questions to be decided have

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“social impacts that are neutral or unavoidable.”

Sometimes these stability-breaking actions can evoke positive feedback from the rest of

the government and interested outsider groups like interest groups or organizations. “Political

ideas become popular quickly and diffuse throughout large areas of the political system until

they have replaced many old ones. Political bandwagons build power, as politicians and interest

group leaders become active in a new cause as it gains popularity.” I will look for evidence in

increased activity of these issues and the state of current policy monopolies that exist and

bandwagons that may form resulting from this.

In Thomas Birkland’s Lessons of Disaster, he utilizes “focusing events” from John

Kingdon’s book, Agenda, Alternatives and Public Policies which can occur after natural

accidents, disasters or terrorists attacks. In Birkland’s previous work he has found that

these events do raise salience and attention to an issue and subsequent agendas, but also that

it leads in some cases to event-related policy change. I will look to see if any major events that

have affected the country raises activity on Twitter.

Thus, three hypotheses are now presented. Issue Ownership may raise salience of issues

During election years due to shifts in prioritization. Current policy monopolies and related

legislation deliberated on the floor of Congress and bandwagoning may explain peaks in activity

in off election years. Focusing events may increase activity and steer public policy in response to

these events.

Data and Methods:

Twitter was created in March 2006 with the emergence of social networking websites around

that time. Currently it is one of the most visited websites on the internet, and many politicians

and government organizations have created accounts and tweet frequently. But their behavior in

what issues they talk about or how frequently they tweet might allow us to make valuable

inferences in this new form of data collection, as opposed to traditional surveys and the like. As I

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have previously stated, all 16 of these issues have become associated with government to a

certain extend on a national level (Medicare, job growth, taxes, economy, education, the deficit,

environment, alternative energy, immigration, health care, the military, poverty, terrorism, trade,

social security and crime). I chose to analyze the time period of November 2011 to February

2015, when I began the research collection. The reasoning was to see any significant effects that

the 2012 election cycle may have on the salience of certain issues. I used Twitter’s built in

advanced search engine and counted the Tweets by hand. I used simple line graphs and other

related models to measure the spikes in activity on the Twitter accounts. I looked at Senator

Gillibrand as a starting point because I interned with her. I explored whether or not her agenda

was independent of the party’s agenda. I looked at her fellow elected official Senator Schumer to

see the comparison between in-state Senators and any correlations or support they may give each

other. To get a national view, I included both parties’ Twitter accounts, the President and

Republican Senator Rand Paul who has often worked with Senator Gillibrand on certain issues.

In search of the tweets I used certain keywords listed in Appendix A, noticing especially in the

case of health care, each party has a personal preference in moniker in regards to addressing the

issue (e.g #Obamacare, health insurance). This may due in part to the GOP’s overall aggressive

behavior on Twitter and reliance on easily identifiable caricatures of complex issues in order to

evoke responses and support online.

Medicare

Medicare is one of the strongest examples for arguing for the validity of the Issue Ownership

theory. The DNC and RNC are the only significant accounts active on this issue, and there is

a strong correlation between them with a large amount of activity during the 2012 election cycle.

The origin of the tweets appear to be either a Democratic response and a Republican defense to

the announcement of the Romney-Ryan “voucher” during the election. However beyond the

2012 election, none of the accounts has significant activity on Twitter regarding Medicare.

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DNC's Tweets on MedicareRNC's Tweets on Medicare

Jobs

Across Gillibrand’s, Schumer’s, the Democrats and GOP’s accounts, there is a considerable

trend of activity in mentioning jobs leading up to the 2012 election. However analyzing the large

amount of activity from the Republican party in mid-2013 does not show any singular effect in

origin, but the tweets are consistently attacking the President, supporting the Keystone pipeline

or more importantly, making an muddied connection between the repeal of the Affordable Care

Act and job growth.

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Deficit

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Reducing the deficit is one issue the Republican party attacked Obama on during the 2012

election. However there is one large peak of activity during February 2013, the State of the

Union address. Evidently President Obama had decided to highlight this issue during a far

reaching press event on television and Twitter activity peaked in response to it. The graph

shows evidence of another strong correlation between the Democratic party and the incumbent

Democratic president.

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DNC's Tweets on the DeficitRNC's Tweets on the DeficitPresident's Tweets on the Deficit

Taxes

The graph here shows increased activity during election years. Once again, the Republican party

consistently focuses on linking taxes stemming from the Affordable Care Act. However,

beginning in March 2013, the IRS was found to be deliberately targeting conservative political

groups. The Republican party made reference to the IRS’s actions with tweets including

#DemandAnswers and capitalized on this national level scandal. Senator Gillibrand peaks her

activity in mid-2012 as a result of the Bring Jobs Home Act S. 2569 and bandwagoning on

President Obama’s push for the extension of middle class tax cuts. In addition she also pushed

for childcare tax credits in March 2014 on the floor of the Senate, creating a peak in activity.

Senator Rand Paul has a peak in activity in response to Tim Cook’s testimony in the Senate

during May 2013. Senator Schumer peaks in activity during April 2014, evidently due in part to

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his specialization in matters of finance and his position on the Senate Finance Committee.

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Looking at Medicare, taxes, job growth and the deficit, there is considerable activity on the

accounts to suggest the shifting of prioritization for these issues, particularly on the national level

among both parties and the President during elections years. However there are other peaks

which shows there are exceptions to be made and these assumptions to be taken holistically.

Economy

Around January 2014, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand peaked in activity on the economy, focusing in

on two specific matters; she focused on unemployment benefits and her uniquely drafted

“Opportunity Plan.” The Republican party throughout this time directly attacked Obama and the

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Affordable Care Act, peaking during election years and following a July 2013 jobs report.

There is a noticeable link between jobs and the economy in regards to the Democratic party as

seen below and President Obama also strongly associates jobs with the economy.

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Education

Around May 2014, Senate Democrats unveiled an initiative called FairShot, and as a part of

this initiative, reducing the effects of student debt was a particular focus. Across the other three

accounts however, it seems to be a consistent consensus issue in the public eye even when

comparing election to non-election years.

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Environment

Senator Gillibrand increased activity in March 2014 in response to the #Up4Climate 15-hour

event in which 30 Senators discussed the growing problem of climate change all throughout the

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night. On June 25th 2013, President Obama announced a Climate Action Plan, which evoked a

large amount of activity from the Republican party. In addition, they also mentioned Keystone

and tried to redirect the discussion towards jobs.

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Gillibrand's Tweets on Env.DNC's Tweets on Env.President's Tweets on Env.

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RNC's Tweets on Env.

Alternative Energy

Alternative energy was one issue the Republican party heavily attacked Obama on,

especially around the time of March 2012. This trend steadily decreased, seeing a substantial

dip during November of that year. However Senator Gillibrand does try to raise support in

January 2013 for the Weatherization Assistance Program & State Energy program, more than

any other period on her discussion of energy.

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Gillibrand's Tweets on Al-ternative En-ergy

Immigration

In regards to Immigration, across all 6 Twitter accounts there exists a considerable spike in the

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salience of addressing illegal immigration around mid-2013 and the end of 2014 for the

Republican Party, Democratic Party and the President. Looking at the individual tweets, the

accounts are responding to the immigration bill S. 744 which was introduced around mid-2013,

so it appears immigration is a consensus issue which raises salience in response to key legislation

currently on floor and has been prioritized by lawmaking. In regards to the peak of activity at the

end of 2014, it has been evidently caused by the Presidential agenda and executive actions taken

and each of the party’s accounts are rebuffing this action. This created a direct link between the

three, but evoking no considerable reaction from either of the three Senators. This evidence

further supports the claim that important legislation raises salience on Twitter and the bursts

characterized by Jones and Baumgartner.

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Rand Paul's Tweets on Immigra-tion

Health Care

The Affordable Care Act has raised the largest amount of activity from the Republican party than

any other issue across these selected consensus issues. Not including other consensus issues,

Republicans spoke about only health care 47% of all total GOP tweets recorded here or 1586

tweets during this time period. The large burst of activity supports Baumgartner’s and Jones’s

claims for policy monopolies in regards to the negative criticism aspect of them.

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Military

Senator Gillibrand clearly has a considerable presence on Twitter in regards to discussion and

raising salience of the military compared to the other five accounts. However she focuses the

majority of these tweets towards her active efforts as a champion for reforming the handling of

sexual assault cases in the military. The trend of data seems to show the buildup of support for

the March 6th, 2014 vote on the Military Justice Improvement Act of 2013, introduced in

November of that year, and Rand Paul seems to be following the sponsor, Senator Gillibrand

through a small spike of activity on that month. In accordance with the nature of policy

monopolies, we see activity here that is “high in volume”. As the monopoly has been established

and decisions are routinized, the issue has “faded from the public agenda.”

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Poverty

President Obama highlighted during his January 2014 State of the Union the issue of raising the

minimum wage and frequently associates alleviating poverty by doing so. Senator Gillibrand has

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also placed this issue on her agenda, and evidence of bandwagoning can be seen in this

correlation. The Republican party responded and linked Keystone to alleviating poverty by

creating more jobs.

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Terrorism

Terrorism only appeared in three peaks of the White House’s account. The first peak was in

regards to the Boston Bombings of 2013, which once again brought terrorism into the public eye

around the country. The second peak was in regards to addressing the growing strength of the

Islamic State in the Middle East. The final peak was in response to the Countering Violent

Extremism summit held in February 2015. No other accounts had registered significant activity.

Thus we can see here Birkland’s claims to an extent and a good place for further analysis would

be the policy changes that has occurred from these two events related to terrorism.

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President's Tweets on Terrorism

President's Tweets on Terrorism

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Trade, Social Security and Crime1

Conclusion:

My findings show important legislation in Congress can have an effect across accounts

depending on the extent the Senators and party are involved with the bill in question. We see this

to especially be the case with regard to Sen. Gillibrand and the Military Justice Improvement

Act. Several of these actors on Twitter seem to limit the scope of these consensus issues to suit

an agenda, either in consideration of the party’s aims or a “policy monopoly” and subsequent

bandwagoning as Baumgartner and Jones

put it or because the actor in question has

a specialization e.g. Sen. Schumer and

Finance. Senator Gillibrand and Schumer

evidently have differing agendas and raise

the salience of different issues, but still

mention each other infrequently. Another

observation is that Issue Ownership could apply to an extent for presidential campaigns and

both parties, but not across all issues. Some of these issues did not even register a considerable

amount of activity and perhaps suggests Twitter cannot serve as a universally adaptable platform

for reaching voters, not bearing in mind the technological limitations of the website and 140

character limit.

Another finding was that the salience of an issue could be raised in response to a

1 These three issues have seemed to not raise any salience or prioritized by either of the parties. However it may prove more useful to analyze some of these issues in the future on a local or state level, where they may be a larger part of a candidate’s agenda or platform to prioritize. Senator Rand Paul for example when found speaking on crime, does not even utilize crime in the actual sense of the word but rather as a figure of speech in criticizing the government’s actions.

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catastrophic event or a pressing foreign policy concern. However, whether effective policy

change follows from this trend has yet to be analyzed. There still exists a large amount of data

on Twitter that have not been analyzed, and some that could be valuable. If possible, comparing

the proportions of Tweets over time about certain issues to the total number of Tweets could

show how priorities shift over time beyond just the frequency of the consensus issue Tweets.

Data from the upcoming 2016 election could prove to be useful if it shows fairly similar peaks in

activity in comparison to the tweets from the 2012 election cycle. To go a step further, if all of

the accounts could have their tweets divided into categories by issues on a month to month basis,

we could see important shifts in prioritization over time. Finally, if there could be a rough

measure of what the average user on Twitter mentions in regards to politics, we could see if

politicians and their activity has any effect on overall salience of issues on Twitter.

Bibliography:

Baumgartner, F., & Jones, B. (2009). Agendas and instability in American politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Birkland, T. (2006). Lessons of disaster policy change after catastrophic events. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

Egan, P. (2013). Partisan priorities: How issue ownership drives and distorts american politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Petrocik, J. (n.d.). Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study. American Journal of Political Science, 825-825.

Twitter. Retrieved April 22, 2015, from https://twitter.com/

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Appendix A: Excel Tables for

all Sixteen Consensus Issues

and Graphs

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