We obtain a list of congressional Twitter accounts from UC San Diego at this webpage. We use the 117th Congress in order to get congressional tweets from 2022, as the 117th Congress was active from 2021-2023. This list is located at data/congress_twitter_117th_combined.csv.
After that, we use twarc to convert account names to user IDs, and then get the timelines of all congressmembers' user IDs for July-September of 2022. We do this at data/accounts_to_timelines.ipynb, and the json files which twarc outputs can be found under data/timelines/.
The descriptive analysis notebook contains visualizations and explorations into congressmembers' user behavior. The main findings from that notebook are as follows:
- The total volume of congressmembers' tweets ranges from about 6,000-10,000 times a week.
- The majority of congressmembers tweet between 10 to 20 times a week, 1 to 3 times a day, and .05 to .15 times an hour.
- Congressmembers tweet up to 4 times as much during the week than on the weekends.
- They rarely tweet at night, and tweet a lot more during the day
We also provide heatmap visualizations of a random sample of congressmembers- aggregating on the hourly level and daily level.