With the midterm campaigns ramping up, many local political parties are ignoring those who want to volunteer

As the 2022 midterm elections approach, volunteers can play a significant role for the Democratic or Republican parties at the county level. In new research, Lee Hannah, Kevin Reuning, and Anne Whitesell look at how easy it is to volunteer for a local political party, and what groups of people find it easier to volunteer. They find that local chapters are more willing to respond to approaches from women and white potential volunteers and if they are an in electorally competitive counties

Facebook algorithm changes may have amplified local Republican parties

In this research note we document changes to the rate of comments, shares, and reactions on local Republican Facebook pages. Near the end of 2018, local Republican parties started to see a much higher degree of interactions on their posts compared to local Democratic parties. We show how this increase in engagement was unique to Facebook and happened across a range of over a thousand local parties. In addition, we use a changepoint model to identify when the change happened and find it lines up with reported information about the change in Facebook’s algorithm in 2018. We conclude that it seems possible that changes in how Facebook rated content led to a doubling of the total shares of local Republican party posts compared to local Democratic party posts in the first half of 2019 even though Democratic parties posted more often during this period. Regardless of Facebook’s motivations, their decision to change the algorithm might have given local Republican parties greater reach to connect with citizens and shape political realities for Americans. The fact that private companies can so easily control the political information flow for millions of Americans raises clear questions for the state of democracy

Local political parties are more likely to use Facebook than websites to connect with voters.

Local political parties are an important part of US politics, as they are often the best placed to mobilize voters and to recruit and support candidates. But how do these groups interact with voters online? In new research Lee Hannah and co-authors looked at the online presence of local parties across the US’ more than 3,100 counties. They found that while fewer than half of county parties had websites, more than two thirds had a presence on Facebook, and that this percentage was even higher for parties based in more urban and more electorally competitive counties

Mapping Influence: Partisan Networks across the United States, 2000 to 2016

AbstractThe parties as networks approach has become a critical component of understanding American political parties. Research on it has so far mainly focused on variation in the placement of candidates within a network at the national level. This is in part due to a lack of data on state-level party networks. In this article, I fill that gap by developing state party networks for 47 states from 2000 to 2016 using candidate donation data. To do this, I introduce a backboning network analysis method not yet used in political science to infer relationships among donors at the state level. Finally, I validate these state networks and then show how parties have varied across states and over time. The networks developed here will be made publicly available for future research. Being able to quantify variation in party network structure will be important for understanding variation in party-policy linkages at the state level.</jats:p

Backboning Process for Donation Networks

Provides detailed files to replicate just the backboning process outlined in: Reuning, Kevin "Mapping Influence: Partisan Networks Across the United States, 2000 to 2016." State Politics and Policy Quarterl

Backboning Process for Donation Networks

Provides detailed files to replicate just the backboning process outlined in: Reuning, Kevin "Mapping Influence: Partisan Networks Across the United States, 2000 to 2016." State Politics and Policy Quarterl

Full Cycle Donation Networks

Provides edge lists and metadata for the donation networks created described in: Reuning, Kevin "Mapping Influence: Partisan Networks Across the United States, 2000 to 2016." State Politics and Policy Quarterly Networks are generated for an entire chamber cycle, meaning that every seat in the chamber has been up for election at least once. These networks will overlap over time.</p

Election Donation Networks

Provides edge lists and metadata for the donation networks created described in: Reuning, Kevin "Mapping Influence: Partisan Networks Across the United States, 2000 to 2016." State Politics and Policy Quarterly Networks are generated for an entire chamber cycle, meaning that every seat in the chamber has been up for election at least once. These networks will overlap over time.</p