Web Mining on Political Homophily in the Congressional Twitter Community

Homophily is the social phenomenon that people who are similar in some aspect interact at a significantly higher rate. We conducted web mining based on Twitter's application programming interfaces to investigate political homophily in the congressional Twitter community. We examined the structures of public Twitter communications among active members of the US congress. Our findings showed strong evidence of homophily with respect to party affiliation and a significant higher rate of communication for members in the same party. In an entirely distinct differentiation, we discovered moderate evidence of inverse homophily with respect to seniority and a significant higher rate of communication between members at different seniority levels.