This article examines how House candidates used Twitter during the 2012 campaign. Using a content analysis of every tweet from each candidate for the House in the final two months before the 2012 ...election, this study provides a snapshot of House candidates’ “Twitter style.” In particular, this article shows that incumbents, Democrats, women, and those in competitive races tweet differently than challengers, Republicans, minor party candidates, men, and those in safe districts.
You Tweet Like a Girl! Evans, Heather K.; Clark, Jennifer Hayes
American politics research,
03/2016, Volume:
44, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
We investigate the Twitter activity of all congressional candidates leading up to the 2012 U.S. House elections to assess whether there are significant differences in the tone and content of the ...tweets from male and female candidates. We argue that the electoral environment will have a significant effect over whether candidates engage in negative tweeting, address political issues, and discuss so-called “women’s issues” on Twitter. We find that gender has both a direct and contextual effect on candidates’ communication style on Twitter. Female candidates tweet significantly more “attack-style” messages than their male counterparts, discuss policy issues at a significantly higher rate, and women representatives focus more on “women’s issues.” We also find strong contextual effects in races with more female candidates: There is significantly more tweeting about political issues as well as significantly more negative attack-style tweets. However, with more female candidates, the number of tweets about “women’s issues” declines.
Previous work in the area of gender and social media has shown that women campaign and market themselves online very differently than men. While female candidates are more likely to discuss certain ...types of issues (like education and healthcare) in their campaigns, some research has shown that as more women are added to a congressional race, less attention is paid to those "women's issues." Given the steady increase in the number of women running for office and the increasing saliency of "women's issues" in American politics, this study examines the ways that female candidates marketed themselves differently than their male competitors in the 2020 U.S. House races on Twitter, paying particular attention to the influence of partisanship. The results show that women stressed different policy priorities in their tweets in 2020 compared to male candidates. While partisanship affects what issues get highlighted by candidates on Twitter, gender plays a role in whether candidates discuss issues that directly affect women as a group. Controlling for the context of the race, these findings demonstrate that when more women are added to a race, the likelihood of discussing "women's issues" increases.
Background
Previous research demonstrates that congressional communication on Twitter is gendered. Congresswomen are more likely to tweet about issues than Congressmen during elections, and they are ...also more likely to tweet about “women's issues” (healthcare, education, reproductive rights, welfare) than their male counterparts.
Objectives
Given the partisan and gendered coronavirus disease (COVID‐19) pandemic effects researchers have documented, we examine whether Congressmembers. communication about COVID‐19 is also gendered and partisan.
Methods
To examine how Senators and House Representatives were discussing the pandemic online, we collected the tweets sent by members of both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate from February 1st until May 14th, 2020.
Results
Gender and partisanship shape how members communicate about COVID‐19 on Twitter, and this is especially pronounced in the framing of COVID‐19 in terms of “women's issues.”
Conclusion
We find evidence that there is a gendered partisan divide in both the frequency and framing of the issue on Twitter. This divide is likely to continue to shape how the public thinks about the pandemic and how elites. respond to the pandemic.
Recent work by Evans, Cordova, and Sipole (2014) reveals that in the two months leading up to the 2012 election, female House candidates used the social media site Twitter more often than male ...candidates. Not only did female candidates tweet more often, but they also spent more time attacking their opponents and discussing important issues in American politics. In this article, we examine whether the female winners of those races acted differently than the male winners in the 2012 election, and whether they differed in their tweeting‐style during two months in the summer of 2013. Using a hand‐coded content analysis of every tweet from each member in the U.S. House of Representatives in June and July of 2013, we show that women differ from their male colleagues in their frequency and type of tweeting, and note some key differences between the period during the election and the period after. This article suggests that context greatly affects representatives' Twitter‐style.
Political communication is a dynamic, interdisciplinary field that has grown in stature and reach in recent decades, becoming more international in scope and orientation while gaining respect in ...political science as a legitimate area of inquiry. In the evolving and participatory media-politics landscape, it becomes important to ask how the cross-disciplinary project of political communication research is keeping pace with changing conditions that provide a greater structural role for the press in politics and new technology in the enactment of citizenship. To track these trends in research, this paper reports the results of a longitudinal content analysis of research articles published in the journals Political Communication and the International Journal of Press/Politics for the period 1996-2016. For each year, we selected one issue at random and examined all research articles in that issue, excluding reviews, invited theme essays, and commentaries. Altogether, 229 articles were included in the analysis. Results indicate a noticeable increase in the internationalization of political communication research over the 20-year analysis period, a slight decrease in research expressing a negative evaluative tone toward the media over time, and consistent growth in the percentage of articles with a media-centric focus, defined as positioning the press as a central consideration in the study and regarding news media as central to democratic life. In light of these findings, the unique interpretive lenses that researchers adopt depending on discipline are explored in relation to ongoing developments in political communication research.
In this article we examine every tweet congresspersons sent from the time the media broke the news of President Trump’s fateful July 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky up to a week ...after House Speaker Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry. Our aim is to understand the type of rhetoric Members of Congress (MCs) engaged in with respect to what we call the Ukraine Whistleblower Scandal (UWS). It is evident from our analysis that Democrats were more likely to sound off on the UWS, which comports with the fact that it was a Republican President who got into trouble. Further, there are characteristics of MCs that make them more likely to frame and discuss the UWS in certain ways, like House Representatives holding law degrees or serving on one of the House committees investigating the UWS. Finally, in this age of hyper-polarized parties, party affiliation was consistently the most important factor shaping representatives’ Twitter statements on the UWS. In historical perspective, the overriding importance of party affiliation is lamentable since the charges against President Trump were solemn and serious.
Avascular necrosis (AVN) of the femoral head (FH) is believed to be caused by a multitude of etiologic factors and is associated with significant morbidity in younger populations. Eventually, the ...disease progresses and results in FH collapse. Thus, a focus on early disease management aimed at joint preservation by preventing or delaying progression is key. The use of stem cells (SC) for the treatment of AVN of the FH has been proposed. We undertook a systematic review of the medical literature examining the use of SC for the treatment of early stage (precollapse) AVN of the FH, in both pre-clinical and clinical studies.
Data collected included: Pre-clinical studies - model of AVN, variety and dosage of SC, histologic and imaging analyses. Clinical studies - study design, classification and etiology of AVN, SC dosage and treatment protocol, incidence of disease progression, patient reported outcomes, volume of necrotic lesion and hip survivorship.
In pre-clinical studies, the use of SC uniformly demonstrated improvements in osteogenesis and angiogenesis, yet source of implanted SC was variable. In clinical studies, groups treated with SC showed significant improvements in patient reported outcomes; however hip survivorship was not affected. Discrepancies regarding dose of SC, AVN etiology and disease severity were present.
Routine use of this treatment method will first require further research into dose and quality optimization as well as confirmed improvements in hip survivorship.
With sparse treatment options, cardiac disease remains a significant cause of death among humans. As a person ages, mitochondria breakdown and the heart becomes less efficient. Heart failure is ...linked to many mitochondria-associated processes, including endoplasmic reticulum stress, mitochondrial bioenergetics, insulin signaling, autophagy, and oxidative stress. The roles of key mitochondrial complexes that dictate the ultrastructure, such as the mitochondrial contact site and cristae organizing system (MICOS), in aging cardiac muscle are poorly understood. To better understand the cause of age-related alteration in mitochondrial structure in cardiac muscle, we used transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and serial block facing-scanning electron microscopy (SBF-SEM) to quantitatively analyze the three-dimensional (3-D) networks in cardiac muscle samples of male mice at aging intervals of 3 mo, 1 yr, and 2 yr. Here, we present the loss of cristae morphology, the inner folds of the mitochondria, across age. In conjunction with this, the three-dimensional (3-D) volume of mitochondria decreased. These findings mimicked observed phenotypes in murine cardiac fibroblasts with CRISPR/Cas9 knockout of
(some members of the MICOS complex), and
, which showed poorer oxidative consumption rate and mitochondria with decreased mitochondrial length and volume. In combination, these data show the need to explore if loss of the MICOS complex in the heart may be involved in age-associated mitochondrial and cristae structural changes.
This article shows how mitochondria in murine cardiac changes, importantly elucidating age-related changes. It also is the first to show that the MICOS complex may play a role in outer membrane mitochondrial structure.
This article considers whether candidates strategically use emotional rhetoric in social media messages similar to the way that fear appeals are used strategically in televised campaign ...advertisements. We use a dataset of tweets issued by the campaign accounts of candidates for the US House of Representatives during the last two months of the 2018 midterm elections to determine whether candidate vulnerability predicts the presence of certain emotions in social media messages. Contrary to theoretical expectations, we find that vulnerability does not appear to inspire candidates to use more anxious language in their tweets. However, we do find evidence of a surprising relationship between sad rhetoric and vulnerability and that campaign context influences the use of other forms of negative rhetoric in tweets.
PDF
