Anna Rulloda majored in political science and minored in both statistics and ethics, public policy, science and technology at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
In her paper for SSRIC’s annual Social Science Student Symposium (S4) conference, Rulloda presented a paper combining many of those interests.
She undertook a massive data-collection process, scraping web data on 2018 congressional candidates’ Twitter activity and then coding the contents of candidates’ tweets.
Grouping this data into eight categories based on whether a candidate was female or male, Democrat or Republican, and won or lost, she compared the content of tweets by candidates from each category with respect to a variety of gender civil rights topics.
She found that, controlling for party and whether they won or lost, female candidates tweeted more often than male candidates about family issues and the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination, while Democratic candidates tweeted about LGBTQ, health, racial and civil rights issues more often that Republican candidates did.
Rulloda put this experience to good use after graduation—she now works as an analyst for Twitter.