The more expensive and competitive the election, the more Twitter will talk about it
In recent years, journalists, political elites, and the public have used Twitter as an indicator of political trends. Given this usage, what effect do campaign activities have on Twitter discourse? What effect does that discourse have on electoral outcomes? We posit that Twitter can be understood as a tool for and an object of political communication, especially during elections. This study positions Twitter volume as an outcome of other electoral antecedents and then assesses its relevance in election campaigns. Using a data set of more than 3 million tweets about 2014 U.S. Senate candidates from three distinct groups—news media, political actors, and the public—we find that competitiveness and money spent in the race were the main predictors of volume of Twitter discourse, and the impact of competitiveness of the race was stronger for tweets coming from the media when compared to the other groups. Twitter volume did not predict vote share for any of the 35 races studied. Our findings suggest that Twitter is better understood as a tool for political communication, and its usage may be predicted by money spent and race characteristics. As an object, Twitter use has limited power to predict electoral outcomes.
First Amendment gives Americans the right to access to information held by the courts
“Publicity is the very soul of justice,” legal philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote in 1827. Regrettably, lady justice is at risk of losing her soul. In courts across the country, secrecy is increasingly the norm. Indeed, the extent of secrecy in American courts is astonishing, especially given the assumption by many that the First Amendment guarantees a right of public access to the courts. In reality, the United States Supreme Court has explicitly held only that there is a First Amendment right of public access to criminal trials and pre-trial proceedings. The Court has never addressed the question of whether there is a constitutional right of access to civil proceedings or to court records. Moreover, the Court’s last pronouncement on this issue occurred more than a quarter of a century ago and left the lower courts with a confusing and inconsistent doctrinal roadmap for dealing with public access questions. In the intervening decades, public access to the courts has been quietly under siege.
This is a critical time for court transparency because the courts, like so many institutions of government, are in the midst of a transformation from the largely paper-based world of the twentieth century to an interconnected, electronic world where physical and temporal barriers to information are disappearing. Not surprisingly, the shift to electronic access to the courts can implicate important privacy interests. As a result of these and other concerns, a number of courts and legislatures are considering sharply limiting public access to certain court proceedings and records.
By focusing on the structural role the First Amendment plays in our constitutional system, this article makes two related arguments. First, a central purpose of the First Amendment is to ensure that citizens can effectively participate in and contribute to our republican system of self-government. Second, in order to effectuate this goal, the First Amendment must be understood to embody an affirmative right of access to information held by the courts, which by virtue of their unique institutional position possess information that is essential for the public to effectively evaluate the workings of government and therefore to act as sovereigns over the government. Drawing on these conclusions, this article reworks existing First Amendment doctrine to shift the emphasis away from the question of whether the public has a right of access to individual judicial proceedings or records to whether the interests supporting secrecy outweigh the structural benefits of public access. This reworking of public access doctrine provides a principled way for courts to evaluate the interests in secrecy while at the same time ensuring that the public’s right of access to the courts is retained.
People are more interested in women candidates when they're running against men
As campaign discussions increasingly circulate within social media, it is important to understand the characteristics of these conversations. Specifically, we ask whether well-documented patterns of gendered bias against women candidates persist in socially networked political discussions. Theorizing power dynamics as relational, we use dialectic configurations between actors as independent variables determining network measures as outcomes. Our goal is to assess relational power granted to candidates through Twitter conversations about them and whether they change depending on the gender of their opponent. Based on more than a quarter of a million tweets about 50 candidates for state-wide offices during the 2014 US elections, results suggest that when a woman opposes a man, the conversation revolves around her, but she retains a smaller portion of rhetorical share. We find that gender affects network structure—women candidates are both more central and more replied to when they run against men. Despite the potential for social media to disrupt deeply rooted gender bias, our findings suggest that the structure of networked discussions about male and female candidates still results in a differential distribution of relational power.