Using Twitter to Study Public Discourse in the Wake of Judicial Decisions PUBLIC REACTIONS TO THE SUPREME COURT'S SAME-SEX-MARRIAGE CASES

At the intersection of behavioral and institutional studies of policy making lie a series of questions about how elite choices affect mass public opinion. Scholars have considered how judicial decisions-especially US Supreme Court decisions-affect individuals' support for specific policy positions. These studies yield a series of competing findings. Whereas past research uses opinion surveys to assess how individuals' opinions are shaped, we believe that modern techniques for analyzing social media provide analytic leverage that traditional approaches do not offer. We present a framework for employing Twitter data to study mass opinion discourse. We find that the Supreme Court's decisions relating to same-sex marriage in 2013 had significant effects on how the public discussed same-sex marriage and had a polarizing effect on mass opinion. We conclude by connecting these findings and our analyses to larger problems and debates in the area of democratic deliberation and big-data analysis.