The Unheavenly Chorus: Political Voices of Organized Interests on Social Media

This study provides a descriptive look at the use of social media and the inequality of political voices in the context of political interest organizations. It seeks to answer the question of whether the Internet and social media allow those who were previously outside the power mainstream with respect to the broader democratic discourse to raise their voices and be heard. Overall, we find that social media does not diminish the concentration of political voices within the discourse. Rather, the evidence suggests that political voices are more concentrated when a voice is measured by the size of the online network using social media than when measured using traditional indicators, such as the number of lobbyists. Furthermore, a very small number of large organizations with large online networks (as measured by Twitter followers) are driving this high concentration of online political voices.