Capturing Group Formation: Using Twitter to Track the Birth and Evolution of New Political Organisations

Selection bias is a common problem in the study of new political organizations. Organizations generally do not receive scholarly attention until they have done something notable, which implicitly requires that they have passed through important preliminary milestones for survival. Thus, the field of existing political organizations is a group that has been selected, to some degree, by the competitive pressures of its environment. Due to this problem, political scientists have inadequate understandings of why new political organizations are founded, how they are organized, how they are affected by contemporary political pressures, and why they survive or fail. A solution to this problem is to study new organizations at their earliest stage of formation. This study is an effort to do exactly that. We systematically searched a random sample of data from Twitter for evidence of new organizations formed in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. We identified 22 new political organizations. We then matched each of these organizations to one existing political organization, founded at least five years earlier, that was similar to these organizations in terms of its political niche. We then followed these 44 organizations on Twitter for 2 years, recording all of the Tweets that they sent or were mentioned in. Our analysis compares newly founded organizations to existing political organizations in the United States. The goals of our analysis are: (1) to identify common characteristics of new organizations and how they compare to existing organizations; (2) to determine how forces in the political environment shape the nature of political organizations; and (3) to understand how political organizations evolve over time.