Abstract

We contrast the number of "likes" that a given politician gives to another one on Twitter and the number of bills voted in favor by the same pair of politicians to empirically study how signals of agreement in Twitter translate into cross-cutting voting during a highly polarized period of time. As our main contribution, we document empirical evidence that "likes" between opponents are positively related to the number of bills voted by the same pair of politicians in Congress, even when we control by politicians' time-invariant characteristics, coalition affiliation, directed and undirected dyads and following links in Twitter.