  In recent years researchers have gravitated to social media platforms,
especially Twitter, as fertile ground for empirical analysis of social
phenomena. Social media provides researchers access to trace data of
interactions and discourse that once went unrecorded in the offline world.
Researchers have sought to use these data to explain social phenomena both
particular to social media and applicable to the broader social world. This
paper offers a minireview of Twitter-based research on political crowd
behavior. This literature offers insight into particular social phenomena on
Twitter, but often fails to use standardized methods that permit interpretation
beyond individual studies. Moreover, the literature fails to ground
methodologies and results in social or political theory, divorcing empirical
research from the theory needed to interpret it. Rather, papers focus primarily
on methodological innovations for social media analyses, but these too often
fail to sufficiently demonstrate the validity of such methodologies. This
minireview considers a small number of selected papers; we analyze their (often
lack of) theoretical approaches, review their methodological innovations, and
offer suggestions as to the relevance of their results for political scientists
and sociologists.
