  The political requires a forum for its deliberation and Habermas has located
it in the public spheres. Originally, mass media's role was one of a
facilitator of these debates. However, under the immense pressures of free
market competition and mobile audiences, mass media prefers episodic over
thematic news. On the opposite end of the spectrum, social media has been
heralded as a new forum, a reincarnation of the ailing public spheres to
further the deliberation of the political. But do the followers of political
parties in social media endorse thematic or episodic content?
  To answer this question, I look at the most recent 3,200 tweets that were
broadcast from the Republican and Democratic Twitter accounts. By employing
Latent dirichlet allocation, I extract the prevailing topics of these tweets
and linked websites. Generalized linear models are used to describe the
relationship between episodicity, thematicity and the endorsement counts of the
posts analyzed.
  I find that there is a stark contrast between the behavior of Democratic and
Republican followers. In general, there seems to be a slight preference for
thematic messages. Interestingly, the distance to an election increases the
odds of a message to be endorsed.
