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

When large-scale social media accounts engage in political discussions, do they influence their audience, and if so, how? The existing literature often attributes the influence of social media accounts to celebrity status effects, such as parasocial relationships. These explanations overlook a key feature of digital spaces: the reactions of others. Online, reactions from others are always instantly visible through likes, comments, reshares, and posts. In this paper, we experimentally test whether parasocial relationships drive political influence and if in-group reactions condition such effects. Leveraging social media advertising for recruitment, we microtarget members of the online in-group around Taylor Swift. The results show no support for either hypothesis; the study is not powered to detect small effects, but across all hypothesis tests, we find no parasocial effect, nor a conditional effect of in-group signals.

The Zoom link will be sent upon registration.