This is a follow-up post to Why doesn’t the Tory MP have Twitter friends? — a report on some early research into the interrelationships between the few Westminster MPs who are on Twitter.
According to Tweetminster, the number of UK MPs on Twitter has doubled since this time last month. Where there were eight Twittering MPs, there are now sixteen. Here’s the map that shows who follows whom (the labels may be too small to read — if you want to see a larger image, click on the map.
I’ve coloured each node to show party affiliation; for those of you who are unfamiliar with British politics, Labour (our left-of-centre party) shows up in red, Conservatives (our right-of-centre party) in blue, and Liberal Democrats (what it says on the tin) in yellow.
The size of each node represents the individual’s “betweenness centrality” — a network analysis term that helps us place a value on individuals within a network. To give you a sense of what it means, the higher the betweenness centrality of an individual, the greater the impact when you take them out of the network. For those of you who work in large companies, it may be worth noting that senior management’s personal assistants generally have very high betweenness — something that is mostly remarked upon when they go on holiday (simultaneous translation: “take a vacation”.)
So far so good. By now, regular readers will probably be kissing their teeth and thinking “so what?” I’ve done a lot of these Twitter maps in the past and the novelty must be wearing off on you by now.
So here’s the thing. There are a few network analysis techniques that let one identify cliques and factions. What we’ve got here is a small set where we already know what people’s affiliations should be. How interesting, I thought, would it be to see how well the calculated result fits the real world data? Here’s what I found:
To my fairly untrained eye, the fit seems remarkably good. Only one MP out of sixteen is incorrectly placed (Derek Wyatt should be tightly affiliated to the “Labour” faction, but shows up affiliated to the “Lib Dem” faction.) That’s 1⁄16 wrong (or 93.75% accurate.)
The usual caveats
The method I used relies on you telling it how many factions there are. I knew there were three, so that’s what I told it. But what if I’d said two, or four? The software I’m using tells you how well-fitted the result is to the data, so there’s some feedback at least. But I’m going to need to play with this a lot more before I’m fully confident about putting it in front of a client.
I’m not a statistician, but even I know there’s something fishy about my claims to 93.75% accuracy.
r/t@mediaczar new post on the relationships between Westminster twitterers http://is.gd/jpWU
Can we calculate party affiliation through Twitter: http://bit.ly/Ljk6w – a great blog post by @mediaczar
@delineator http://tinyurl.com/d693dx
Interesting, from @mediaczar via @tweetminster: Can we calculate party affiliation through Twitter? http://bit.ly/Ljk6w
Its obvious that MPs in the UK’s parliament are sheep, following whatever is percieved to be ‘trendy’ in the media. Hence the doubling of twittering MPs over the period where twitter has been garnering alot of media attention, like they’ll ever actually use it to communicate with the people or listen when the people communicate with them.
So cynical @mandrill?! Actually, taking a look at when most of them joined, it seems that as a group they’re ahead of the hype curve (although still a good 12 months and more after you joined.) I’d pay particular attention to @Tom_Watson…
Even if this weren’t the case, I hope you’re not seriously suggesting that it’s not an MP’s duty to represent (and engage with) their constituents in the best way possible? If this is true, surely they have an obligation to keep in touch with new technologies and channels like Twitter?
Or would you prefer that they got all their information about Twitter at second hand — retailed to them through the traditional media and dinner party conversations?
Just because everyone else is doing something, doesn’t mean it’s wrong to join in, you know. That would be a foolish strategy, IMHO.
I am suggesting that it is an MP’s duty to engage with their constituents as often and in as many ways as they can. Its just that from my experience they don’t.
As to the adoption of new technologies, the inhabitants of the Westminster villiage are notoriously behind the curve (apart from an exceptional few). If I want ot fire a tweet at my MP, I can’t. I have to send an email to be filtered by a civil servant so that the person (who I didn’t vote for btw, but thats another bee in quite another bonnet) who is my unchosen representative never sees it. Or make an appointment at a time which is inconvenient for me and wait for an hour or more whilst Mrs. Jones from down the way complains about the dog mess in the streets (Which my MP can do nothing about).
As you can probably tell I don’t really think much of our elected representatvies or the system they use to rule us (and rule they do, I won’t dress it up) who I still believe to be followers rather than leaders. Alot of the legislation brought in ove the last 11 years has been reactive rather than proactive, usually in response to whatever the redtops are harping on about leaving the really important stuff which they should be dealing with to be buried in a bureaucratic quagmire.
MPs have more contact with lobbyists, donors, and civil servants than they do the people they actually represent and their policies have reflected this. No amount of twittering at them is going to change this fact.
Mandrill, what are you suggesting? That an MP should be directly available to all 72,000-or-so constituents? Have you got any idea how many letters, emails, meetings etc with constituents an MP has to deal with? Even with willing, there wouldn’t be enough hours in a day… your suggestions just dont work in the real world. Which is why people form pressure groups etc to lobby… they represent groups of people with similar interests. All this is Politics 101…
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