The Impact of Twitter Adoption on Decision Making in Politics

Organizations have used social media extensively to engage customers, but little is known whether such engagement truly influences organizations´ decisions to make them closer to their customers. This paper studies this question in a unique context -- the impact of adoption of Twitter on U.S. Congressmen´s voting behavior. In particular, we consider whether the adoption makes Congressmen to vote more in line with the political orientation of their constituents. We constructed a panel data for 442 Members of the 111th U.S. House of Representatives across a period of 24 months. We exploit the variation in joining Twitter across Congressmen to identify the impact of joining Twitter on voting behavior. Using a fixed effect model, we found that the adoption of Twitter makes Congressmen to vote more in line with their constituents. That is, in districts where Congressmen are more conservative than the constituent Twitter adoption results in less conservative votes by Congressmen. Similarly, in districts where Congressmen are more liberal than the constituent, Twitter adoption results in less liberal votes by the Congressmen.