Use of Twitter to Enhance Candidate Visibility during the 2014 US Campaign: What 140 Characters Reveal about the Cultivating of Ballot Propositions by Candidates

Increasingly, candidates and political parties in the United States have tied ballot issues to their campaigns in an attempt to set the agenda. In addition, politicians around the world have actively adopted social networking tools as mediums for communicating with the electorate. The aim of this paper is to investigate candidates’ level of engagement in ballot proposition campaigns. In particular, I look at the number of messages related to statewide ballot measures that candidates posted on Twitter as a means of quantifying their involvement in ballot campaigns. This paper analyzes both strategic considerations and ideological arguments. To test these theoretical arguments, this paper examines the Twitter activities of 72 candidates running for governor in the US 2014 midterm elections based on a data set which comprises daily observations over a period of 308 days.