Social Watching a 2012 Republican Presidential Primary Debate

Abstract

This study examines the “Twitter election of 2012,” and specifically young citizens’ “social watching” behaviors while live-tweeting a 2012 nationally televised Republican primary debate. We find several important relationships between key demographic, social, and political engagement variables and participants’ social watching activity (frequency of tweeting while watching the debate). We also find important links between tweet content (frequency of candidate mentions in tweets) and debate viewers’ candidate evaluations.

Keywords

presidential campaign primary debate social media Twitter social watching

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