Politicians’ willingness to agree: evidence from the interactions in twitter of Chilean deputies

ABSTRACT

We contrast the number of “likes” that a given politician gives to another one on Twitter and the number of bills voted in favor by the same pair of politicians to empirically study how signals of agreement in Twitter translate into cross-cutting voting during a highly polarized period of time. As our main contribution, we document empirical evidence that ”likes” between opponents are positively related to the number of bills voted by the same pair of politicians in Congress, even when we control by politicians’ time-invariant characteristics, coalition affiliation, directed and undirected dyads and following links in Twitter.

KEYWORDS:

• Disagreement
• polarization
• twitter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The empirical analysis of these political networks follows a revealed preference approach where politicians and voters’ preferences could be characterized from their observed political behavior (Henry & Mourifié, 2013).

2. Harmon et al. (2019) is one exception that exploits seating rules in the European Parliament to show that sitting adjacently leads to more political agreement.

3. We understand cross-cutting voting as two political opponents favoring the same bill.

4. We explicitly acknowledge that a signal of affection in Twitter can be confound by other dynamic effects that link two politicians at some point in time. Consequently, as a minimum the relevance of our findings are related to Twitter as a new source of information.

5. A “retweet” is a re-posting of a Tweet (message) from another user in Twitter. A “follower” is someone that decides to receive the Tweets of another user.

6. We understand the public political debate in a Habermasian sense, this is, as a public sphere where different actors try to advance their positions trough communicative rationality.

7. Grant et al. (2010) empirically show that politicians behavior in Twitter is noisy as is mainly related to broadcasting than engaging in dialogue.

8. Technically speaking, Heckman and Snyder (1996) show that empirical spatial voting estimates can be seen as a voting application of the revealed preference theory.

9. The Constitution of 1980 was approved by a referendum held under the Dictatorship’s supervision and later modified by democratic-elected president Ricardo Lagos Escobar in 2005. Even though Lagos Escobar introduced several reforms to the Constitution, it was never considered a completely new one.

10. La Nueva Mayoría (New Majority) was an offset of the center-left coalition Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia, a new coalition of center-left and left parties supporting the presidential candidacy of Michelle Bachelet in the 2013 election. It included some political parties that did not participate from government in the Concertación, like the Chilean Communist Party

11. Fábrega et al. (2018) suggest that the student protests of 2006 and 2011 are early signs of their measured political polarization.

12. The 2020 Chilean national referendum was held in Chile on October 25th. The referendum asked whether a new constitution should be drafted, and whether it should be drafted by members elected directly for this purpose, or by a mixed body, made up in halves by currently sitting members of Congress and directly elected citizens. The “Approve” side won with 78% agreeing to draft a new constitution. On how the new text should be written, 79 choose the entire newly elected body.

13. This idea was introduced by (Zhang et al., 2008) that calculated network’s modularity using votes from the U.S. Congress. Intuitively, the modularity corresponds to an aggregated measure of the intra-coallition versus inter-coallition interactions. For more details see A.

14. Martin (2015) proposes that ideologies are not necessarily internally consistent. However, ideologies would provide a representation of political alliances, and more importantly, the nature of political opponents.

15. Hinich and Munger (1996) cites the case of the minimum wage debate analyzed by Friedman (1966). Political disagreement in this case can be easily disentangled into values, and different predictions over the effects on the poverty rate or the labor market.

16. The practical implication of this assumption is that, in our model, some politicians are, exogenously more ideologically flexible than others, regardless of their ideological positions.

17. The specific parameter assumptions that govern the electoral population are shown 11.

18. Until 2017 Chile had a modified D’Hondt system with two seats by electoral entity (Dow, 2001). It has been argued by this system forced bipartisanship trough the formation of two coalitions in order to maintain political stability (Riquelme et al., 2018)

19. In C we show that the assumed distribution of voters has implications that are related to violations of the median voter theorem. In our baseline case, some politicians have incentives to move toward the extremes of the political spectrum.

20. For a detailed description of our estimation see Appendix B

21. The field work last 2 months approximately.

22. This data has been used to analyze Chilean politics in the empirical Public Choice literature, see Bonilla et al. (2011).

23. In our model we specifically address this issue, offering an interpretation in term of the median voter theorem.

24. Our proposed method is explained in Appendix B

25. In our model, we specifically address this issue, offering an interpretation in term of the median voter theorem.

26. For a more detailed analysis of the sampled 28 politicians see Figure 2.

27. See A for more details.

28. The Louvain method is based on a greedy optimization method, while the Edge Betweenness algorithm is an iterative process based on betweenness centrality.

29. The decline in modularity of the network of votes in favor by June 2020 is related to the cross-party agreement of an emergency coronavirus plan.

30. Our results appear to be robust to the methodological choice of community detection algorithm.

31. The Opponent Opp variable is constructed based on party affiliation.

32. In unreported results, we find that our documented positive effect of “likes” between opponents leading to more agreement in Congress survives clustering standard errors by directed politicians’ pairs, and time-undirected politicians’ pairs.

³³ In an unreported result we check that using an Ordered Probit to measure ideology in this context does not make the difference.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pablo A. Henríquez

Pablo A. Henríquez is an Assistant Professor of School of Business and Economics and Director of the Center for Empirical Research in Businesses (CIEN), Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile.

Jorge Sabat

Jorge Sabat is an Assistant Professor of School of Business, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile.

José Patricio Sullivan

José Patricio Sullivan Sullivan is a PhD Candidate in Hispanic Studies at University of Washington at St. Louis, Missouri, USA.