Does Where You Live Influence How You Talk about Politics Online?

• In Event: Interpersonal Networks in Tweets, Conversations, Neighborhoods, and the Pandemic

Abstract

How does where voters live influence how they discuss politics and express their political identities? To test this question, we draw on a nationwide panel of geo-located tweets from 2010-2020. We link these data to administrative voter records to test how where voters live influences their political discourse on Twitter, measuring how frequently voters discuss politics, their political ideology, and their level of out-partisan hostility. We then examine how these outcomes shift as voters move across neighborhoods, cities, and states to test the effect of different levels of political context on each outcome, with particular focus on how the partisan demographics of voters' local residential areas influence their online political discourse.

Authors

• Jacob Brown, Harvard University

• Ryan D. Enos, Harvard University

• Sun Young Park, Harvard University