The Welsh Labour divide
Data shows clear communication split
The Labour party has a clear communication split with most of its Welsh MPs, identified by analysing how the MPs tweet and retweet each on Twitter.
An analysis of more than 19,000 tweets and retweets between Labours MPs over the period of 8 May 2015 (the day after the previous general election) to 10 May 2017 highlighted the division. The period includes the Brexit Referendum, two Labour leadership contests, and one Conservative leadership contest.
A hierarchical cluster analysis was carried to identify groups with similar tweet networks — the largest cluster contained 26 MPs, 19 of which represented Welsh constituencies. The implication is these MPs support, endorse, have similar concerns and interests, to each other.
The 19 MPs are Albert Owen, Carolyn Harris, Chris Bryant, Chris Elmore, Christina Rees, David Hanson, Geraint Davies, Gerald Jones, Ian C. Lucas, Jessica Morden, Jo Stevens, Madeleine Moon, Mark Tami, Nia Griffith, Nick Thomas-Symonds, Paul Flynn, Stephen Kinnock, Susan Elan Jones, Wayne David.
Of the other seven MPs, five represented North-West constituencies (Andrew Gwynne, Ann Coffey, Justin Madders, Christian Matheson, Yvonne Fovargue), with also one London MP (Kate Osamor) and one Yorkshire MP (Nic Dakin).
All 19 Welsh Labour MPs in this list kept their seats on the 8 June election. Of the other nine Welsh Labour MPs, three were not in the data set — Anna McMorrin, a new MP; and Chris Ruane and Tonia Antoniazzi both lost their seats in 2015 and regained them on June 8. The six Welsh Labour MPs not in this Twitter cluster are Nick Smith, Kevin Brennan, Ann Clwyd, Chris Evans, Stephen Doughty (Labour Co-operative), and former party leadership candidate Owen Smith.
In the data set Jeremy Corbyn had tweeted four Welsh MPs over the period analysed.
Carolyn Harris — four tweets including, “Heartbreaking account by @carolynharris24. Support bereaved parents with funeral costs”
Gerald Jones — one tweet, “Shadow Wales Secretary @Rees4Neath; Minister @GeraldJonesLAB are working with @welshlabour; fighting your corner”
Ann Clwyd — one tweet, “With @AnnClwyd MP; Sarah, the granddaughter of the great peace campaigner Peggy Duff, before my Keir Hardie lecture”
Owen Smith — 11 tweets connected to leadership contest, including “
Thank you @OwenSmith_MP, the @UKLabour staff and to the wonderful audience in Cardiff for a positive and comradely debate #LabourLeadership”
Over the period of analysis Jeremy Corbyn had tweeted/retweeted 66 fellow MPs (ranking him 28th in the party for connections), and had sent a total of 247 messages to the MP group (ranking him 13th in the party for volume of messages sent to colleagues). Of the 229 Labour MPs from the 2015 election, 209 had Twitter accounts and they’d all managed to connect with a fellow MP at least once.
Notes:
Mozdeh, created by the University of Wolverhampton Cybermetrics Research Group, was used for the data collection. It can be downloaded here — http://mozdeh.wlv.ac.uk/
A maximum of 3200 tweets, starting with the most recent, were scraped for each MP. If they had tweeted more often than this, to their colleagues and over the time for data collection, those older tweets have not been included in the analysis.
The analysis is based purely on the connections between MPs based on their tweet/retweet patterns, not on the content of their tweets.
Further Twitter analysis of Labour and Conservative MPs is included in this story.
The network data in .net format, and clustering output, is available here — https://github.com/BobBlincoe
