Self Promotion in US Congressional Tweets (2021)

Abstract: Prior studies have found that women self-promote less than men due to gender stereotypes. In this study we built a BERT-based NLP model to predict whether a Congressional tweet shows self-promotion or not and then used this model to examine whether a gender gap in self-promotion exists among Congressional tweets. After analyzing 2 million Congressional tweets from July 2017 to March 2021, controlling for a number of factors that include political party, chamber, age, number of terms in Congress, number of daily tweets, and number of followers, we found that women in Congress actually perform more self-promotion on Twitter, indicating a reversal of traditional gender norms where women self-promote less than men.

## introduction self-promotion is the act of presenting oneself as competent @xcite . it is an important impression management technique in professional communication. prior studies have found that self-promotion, when combined with other impression management techniques such as ingratiation for likeability, resulted in better interview evaluations @xcite . however, selfpromotion was also found to be a risk factor for women-those who self-promoted may have encountered backlash for violating gender stereotypes @xcite . this risk was more pronounced in traditionally male-dominated professions such as politicians. women politicians were faced with the dilemma that, while their job required them to self-promote, doing so may have risked losing likeability and hurt election chances @xcite . the popularization of social media use in recent years might provide an opportunity for women to escape this dilemma. according to the equalization theory, social media has changed the traditional power structures between politicians and the mass media; as a result, marginalized groups such as women may gain more control in impression management strategies by directly interacting with constituents on social media platforms like twitter @xcite @xcite . thus, politicians' self-promotion behavior on twitter is worth investigating further. however, there is scant research on content analysis of politicians' self-promotion on twitter, although prior studies such as @xcite and @xcite have analyzed the topics of congressional tweets. in this research, we model congresspeople's selfpromotion on twitter as an nlp problem. we first manually annotated a corpus of 4,000 tweets as self-promoting or not, and then built a prediction model to identify self-promoting tweets. this model was then used to analyze self-promotion tweets by congress members from july 2017 to march 2021. we seek answers to the following research questions: (1) to what extent can nlp models identify self-promotion tweets from congresspeople? (2) who performed more self-promotion on twitter, men or women? 2 related work ## results applying the above trained bert model to the 2 million tweets posted by the congress members, we found that 16.7% of the tweets contained selfpromotion. to examine gender difference in self-promotion, we adopted a generalized linear mixed-effects regression framework, in which (1) the fixedeffects factors are gender (f/m), political party (d/r), chamber (house/senate), age, number of terms served in congress, number of daily tweets (representing tweet frequency), and number of followers (preprocessed with log transformation due to its highly skewed distribution), (2) the randomeffects factors are the author and the date of a tweet; and (3) the dependent variable is whether a tweet contains self-promotion, of which the value comes from the bert prediction result. we fed the 2 million observations of tweets into the mixed-effects model, using the glmer() function of the r package lme4 @xcite )see appendix a for the detailed regression formula and appendix c for the distribution of the four numerical factors. we are also interested in further examining whether this gender difference has been consistent over the time. to answer this question, for each month from july 2017 to march 2021, we fit the monthly data to the mixed-effects model, and then from each monthly model we calculated the estimated marginal means or expected means.specifically, we used the ggemmeans() awards. since senators represent the entire states, while members of the house represent individual districts, senators are in general more politically powerful, and might be involved in more activities that they can use for self-promotion. it is probably not surprising that younger members do more self-promotion on twitter as they are more social media savvy. the negative correlation between selfpromotion and the tweet frequency (daily tweets) or number of followers indicates that for the members who are less active on twitter or have fewer followers, self-promotion accounts for a larger proportion of their tweets, suggesting that their twitter use is somewhat more focused on self-promotion. ## conclusion contribution. we built an annotated corpus of selfpromotion tweets posted by congress members, and trained a bert-based prediction model with 0.89 macro-f1 score. to the best of our knowledge, this is the first nlp model for predicting self-promotion in political tweets. applying this model to 2 million congressional tweets from july 2017 to march 2021, we found that 16.7% of congressional tweets contained self-promotion. after controlling for a number of factors we found women in congress perform significantly more selfpromotion on twitter than their male colleagues. this indicates a reversal of traditional gender norms where women self-promote less than men.