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Congressional Use of YouTube in 2008
Its Frequency and Rationale
Abstract
This study investigates the extent of candidates’ use of the video sharing YouTube site in 2008, and analyzes which Congressional candidates were more likely to use this tool. A large majority of the major party candidates for the Senate opened YouTube channels as did a much smaller proportion of those running for House seats in 2008. This is about double the percentages of House and Senate candidates who made use of profiles on the social network Facebook site when these emerged as campaign vehicles in 2006. For House candidates, campaign fundraising is the only strategic resource that differentiates both having a YouTube channel and the number of videos posted to it. In addition to better financed candidates, those in competitive elections also were more likely to open channels. Incumbents joined better financed candidates in posting more videos to their channels. Percentage minority is the only constituency attribute related to YouTube use, and is significant only for the level of activity. YouTube is best understood as a vehicle for disseminating campaign communications produced by or for traditional media, especially television, and not so much as a new technology tool. (24 votes)
Comments
Great PowerPoint
Great PowerPoint presentation. I liked that you did NOT show the regression result. The visuals were clear and easy to read. GO PIE CHARTS! Too many people post regression tables, and this isn't as useful as tell me what you found and the implications! Great presentation, and a very interesting paper.
Documenting the candidate process
Even if it is an appendix or a web site appendix to your paper, you might want to document as much about the sign up process as you know. This information is actually interesting to people that think about information security.
Attack ad baseline
As long as you're building baselines ... if it were easy to baseline negative campaign ads on YouTube might be worth mentioning.
Presentation of the statistics
It's been a couple of years since I spent a lot of time reading political science papers, and I've already forgotten the intuition behind the coefficients of a zero inflated negative binomial model. You will probably find that many researchers in other disciplines have a similar reaction -- additional explanations around the meaning of the analysis would be useful for cross-disciplinary readers.