  Assessing political conversations in social media requires a deeper
understanding of the underlying practices and styles that drive these
conversations. In this paper, we present a computational approach for assessing
online conversational practices of political parties. Following a deductive
approach, we devise a number of quantitative measures from a discussion of
theoretical constructs in sociological theory. The resulting measures make
different - mostly qualitative - aspects of online conversational practices
amenable to computation. We evaluate our computational approach by applying it
in a case study. In particular, we study online conversational practices of
German politicians on Twitter during the German federal election 2013. We find
that political parties share some interesting patterns of behavior, but also
exhibit some unique and interesting idiosyncrasies. Our work sheds light on (i)
how complex cultural phenomena such as online conversational practices are
amenable to quantification and (ii) the way social media such as Twitter are
utilized by political parties.
