Presentation at the conference "Twitter and Microblogging: Political, Professional and Personal Practices", Lancaster University, 10 - 12 April 2013

1. TWITTER, POLITICS AND GENDER: WHY
ARE ITALIAN WOMEN POLITICIANS LESS
INTERACTIVE THAN MEN
Stefania Spina
Università per Stranieri, Perugia, Italia

2. Twitter and Italian politicians
• first tweet of a Member of Parliament: march 2007
• December 2012: 70% of Members of Parliament use
Twitter
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

3. Conversationality
• Twitter is based on interaction
• short, public conversations that share a double audience:
• Followers
• pecific users (@mention)
• source of change for political discourse (Spina 2012)
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

4. Three perspectives
• Gender
• “linguistic resources people deploy to present themselves as certain
kinds of women or men”. (Eckert-McConnel-Ginet 2003:5)
• Political discourse
• Chilton (2004):
• representation “in order to be accepted in the political arena” (Wodak 2003);
• interaction
• Computer-mediated discourse (Herring 2008)
• paradigm of interaction: share horizontally dynamic flows of
conversations, new forms of interpersonal relationships
• Gendered attitudes in computer-mediated political discourse
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

5. Research questions
• Does gender affect the way political actors participate to
this flow of conversations, with the aim of interacting with
others and representing themselves as reliable?
• Are there different paths women and men take in the
context of social media interactions to gain a positive
representation of themselves and of their political role?
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

6. Methodology
• corpus-based
• 24 politicians (12 male and 12 female)
• Balanced:
• 1 leader
• 6 Members of Parliament;
• 5 regional and local administrations
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

7. TwitteR (R package)
• last 3000 tweets
• sspina <- userTimeline(‘@sspina’, n=3000)
1: Reply to other tweets in which the author has been mentioned
2: new conversation through the mention of another user
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

8. Corpus composition
• 21191 tweets
• men: 12128
• women: 9063
• 345.000 tokens
• Xml annotation (date, author, sex and type of tweet)
• Pos-tagging
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

9. Analysis of dialogic attitude
1. distribution of tweets that are a response to other tweets
where the politicians have been mentioned;
2. distribution of tweets that start a new conversation with
specific users, selected through @mention;
3. gender and the role of addressees;
4. distribution of selected conversational features.
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

10. Results: use of @mention
per 100 tweets

11. Results: responses to tweets and new
tweets + @mention
per 100 tweets P values < 0.0001

12. Results: involved linguistic features
per 100 tweets P values < 0.0001

13. Results: informational linguistic features
per 100 tweets P values < 0.001

14. Discussion/1
• different strategies taken by women and men within the
stream of conversations
• Conversation: “any exchange of messages between two
or more participants, where the messages that follow bear
at least minimal relevance to those that preceded or are
otherwise intended as responses” (Herring 2010)
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

16. Mention
• deictic marker of addressivity (Herring, Honeycutt 2009)
• associated with conversational activity
• assures coherence to the exchanges, supporting users in tracking
conversations
• tweets disrupted by other intervening messages: strategy for
relating one tweet to another
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

17. #Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

18. tweets that contain a mention
• more focused on an
addressee
• more likely to provide
information for others
• more likely to exhort others
to do something
• their content is more
interactive
tweets without mentions
• more self-focused
• (Herring, Honeycutt 2009)
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

19. Discussion/2
• gender identity is constructed in interaction (Wodak 2003)
• Twitter:
• A place where “we perform our online identities in order to connect
with others” (Zappavigna 2012)
• “each tweet conveys a stance, which reflects the author, the topic,
and the audience” (Bamman et al. 2012)
• context of tweets exchanged by politicians:
• who are the addressees of their messages?
• who do they answer to?
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

20. Male and female interlocutors
per 100 replies per 100 new conversations

21. Roles of addressees

22. Discussion/3
• Involed/informational linguistic features
• gendered attitudes in the way politicians manage social
relations and participate to the flow of conversations on
Twitter
• Data replicates previous findings on online and offline
gender patterns
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

23. Women use more involved features
• expressive lengthening and puntctuation
• @November_67 grazieeeeee! // Buongiorno a tutti !!!!
• Emoticons: more types and different functions
men women
:) :-) ;-) ;) :D :-( :-D :) :-) ;-) :( ;) :* :D :P -_- :'D o_o ^___^ :-| -__-
• Intensifiers:
• grazie ;))))
• Search for conviviality
• A Trapani in partenza x Strasburgo ! Buon inizio settimana ;))
• [In Trapani leaving to Strasblourg! Have a good beginning of the week ;)) ]
• Evaluation
• I mercati ci amano :-) #benvenutasinistra #iovotoSEL http
• [Markets love us :-) #benvenutasinistra #iovotoSEL http]
• …
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

24. Discourse markers
• “members of a functional class of verbal (and non verbal)
devices which provide contextual coordinates for ongoing
talk” (Schriffin 1987).
• Difference in frequency between men and women: non
significant. Why?
• ma, mica, beh, a quanto pare, ecco.*, scusa[te], appunto,
in effetti, effettivamente, senti, mah, come no, boh, vabbè
• [well, at all, as far as it seems, here, here you are, sorry, that’s it, indeed, in
fact, as a matter of fact, listen, who knows, sure, dunno, ok]
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

25. Comparison between:
• Discourse markers used in interactive tweets (with
mention)
• @akappa beh, però ammetterai anche tu che per un profano qualsiasi
quell’articolo filava abbastanza bene :) cmq mi informerò ;)
• [@akappa Well, you will admit as well that for someone that is not informed that article made
sense :) however I will ask about it]
• Discourse markers used in tweets without mentions
• Vabbè non ci siamo capiti…
• [Ok/that’s fine, you don't seem to have understood.]

26. Use in dialogic vs. non-dialogic tweets
Women: diffuse conversational style rather than concrete instantiations of
conversations

27. Conclusions/1
• Twitter and politicians: new approach to audience, based
on horizontal and pervasive forms of conversation;
• in a gender perspective: “window on how women and men
construct their gender and political identity within
conversational flows” (Wodak 2003).
• different attitudes towards Twitter interactions:
• men: seeking for interaction and for dialogue and replying to more
questions
• women: less oriented to conversation, adopt a more self-focused
approach
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

28. Conclusions/2
• Women:
• Frequency of involved features
• spread across dialogic and non-dialogic tweets
• search for informal and convivial styles, and attitude of
personal involvement.
• conversationalization and informalization of public
discourse (Fairclough 1994): different strategy compared
to the instantiation of real conversations.
• Twitter double audience:
• women address more to the general audience of followers
“modelling their public discourse upon the conversational practices
of ordinary life” (Faiclough 1994:253)
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

29. Conclusions /3
• Indirectness
• Conformity to traditional styles
• Lack of competitiveness and authority
• … but mostly
• Lack of willingness to interact with others
• Further research needed:
• More data (more politicians)
• Deeper analysis of different discursive practices:
• When interacting with male/female users
#Lutwit - Lancaster University,10 - 12 April 2013

30. Thank you for your attention!
@sspina

31. References
• Bamman, D., Eisenstein, J., Schnoebelen, T. (2012). Gender in Twitter: Styles, stances, and
social networks. eprint arXiv:1210.4567.
• Eckert, P., McConnel-Ginet, S. (2003). Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
• Fairclough, N. (1994). “Conversationalization of public discourse and the authority of the
consumer”. In R. Keat & N. Whitely & N. Abercrombie (Eds.), The authority of the consumer.
London: Routledge.
• Herring, S. C. (2008). “Computer-Mediated Discourse”. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, & H. E.
Hamilton (Eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (pp. 612-634). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
• Honeycutt, C., Herring, S. C. (2009). “Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration
via Twitter”. Proceedings of the Forty-Second Hawai’i International Conference on System
Sciences (HICSS-42). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press.
• Schriffin, D. (1987). Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Spina, S. (2012). Openpolitica. Il discorso dei politici italiani nell’era di Twitter. Milano:
FrancoAngeli.
• Wodak, R. (2003). “Multiple Identities: The Roles of Female Parliamentarians in the EU
Parliament”. In Holmes-Meyerhoff. The Handbook of Language and Gender, 671-698.
Malden: Blackwell.
• Zappavigna, M. (2012). The Discourse of Twitter and Social Media. How We Use Language
to Create Affiliation on the Web. London: Continuum.

32. Second person pronouns

33. Evolution of replies

34. Age and replies

35. Exception: links
Men women
36,4% 65,1%
move the interaction to other non-
dialogic spaces outside the social
network (blog, newspapers articles)

36. CMC abbreviations
nn = non (not); prox = prossimo (next); msg =
messaggio (message)