Online political influence

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Cathrine Valentin Kjaer, PhD researcher at EUI

How does political influence through social media accounts work? Existing literature often attributes influence from social media accounts to celebrity status effects like para-social relationships and rich-get-richer network dynamics. These explanations neglect a key feature of digital spaces: the reactions of others. Online, the reactions of others are always instantly present through likes, comments, reshares, and posts. Building on research in social psychology, we argue that such online group dynamics condition the effect of political influence from social media accounts. We test this through an online survey experiment. Leveraging social media advertising for recruitment, we microtarget members of the online ingroup around Taylor Swift.

This recruitment strategy allows us to hold selected exposure, community membership, and parasocial relationships constant, thereby enabling us to tease out how online reactions are conditioning the political influence of a parasocial relationship. By doing so, we argue that the political influence of online accounts lies with and among the followers. Social media actors might set the agenda by discussing topics they deem important, but the group dynamics among the audience drive the influence.

The Zoom link will be sent upon registration.