![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The social media and microblogging site Twitter has emerged as both a vehicle for political expression and a powerful tool for political organizing within the African American community. This paper examines the extent to which members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) utilize Twitter to communicate with their constituents about racial issues. An analysis of CBC members’ tweets during the 113th Congress (2013–2014) shows that the organization’s members do talk about race and occasionally use racially distinct hashtags. Moreover, statistical analyses show that the best predictors of a CBC members’ engagement with racial issues on Twitter are being a woman legislator, the size of their margin of victory in the 2012 elections, and the percentage of whites living within the boundaries of their district.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Laura Day, Ana Estrada, and Alice Welna for their assistance with this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Gripping first hand accounts of this period in the history of the CBC are provided by Clay (Citation1993) and Dellums (Citation2000).
2 For excellent overviews of the intersectionality concept as a paradigm in political science research, see Hancock (Citation2007) and Smooth (Citation2006).
3 When Representative Frederica Wilson (D-FL) is removed from the sample, gender remains a statistically significant predictor variable at the .01% level. The negative binomial regression coefficient is .801 (standard error = .264) and the incident rate is 2.22 (standard error = .589).
4 For studies that developed this conventional wisdom on deracialization, see McCormick and Jones (Citation1993), Perry (Citation1991), and Wright (Citation1996).