Theses Bachelor's

Black Twitter, Black Voters, and Black Issues: The Role of Black Twitter Discourse in the 2020 Democratic Primary

Atkins, Nia

This thesis presents evidence on the relationship between Black Twitter, Black voting patterns, and the mainstream media. I collect public opinion polls, newspaper articles, and Twitter data and proceed to conduct sentiment analyses and calculate word frequencies in order to assess Black Twitter sentiment toward political candidates as well as issue salience on Black Twitter and in mainstream newspapers. I then estimate linear regression models—one to assess the relationship between Black Twitter sentiment towards presidential candidates and candidate polling numbers—and the other to assess the relationship between the salience of issues on Black Twitter and the salience of those same issues in the mainstream media. The analysis suggests a substantial positive relationship of weak statistical significance between Black Twitter sentiment and Black voter support, and a negligible relationship between Black Twitter issue salience and mainstream media issue salience.

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More About This Work

Academic Units
Political Science
Thesis Advisors
Harris, Fredrick Cornelius
Degree
B.A., Columbia University
Published Here
December 15, 2021