Political Identity Ownership: Style in Social Media Political Advertising

• In Event: Social Identity, Power, and Mis- and Disinformation

Abstract

A dominant strain of scholarship across political science and communication has focused on the informational elements of democracy. Policy makers, reformers, and academics are deeply concerned about factual information – in the wake of Brexit and the 2016 U.S. presidential election, this has led to an intense focus on mis- and disinformation, especially on social media platforms (see Bernstein, 2021; Simon & Camargo, 2021). At the same time, recent work in political science argues that politics – and by extension campaigns – are fundamentally about identity (Achen & Bartels, 2016; Mason, 2018). Left unexplored in this work is how and why identity is constructed and communicated to the public. Political communication should be understood and analyzed not only for their informational basis, but also as a performance of identity ownership (Kreiss et al., 2021). This study examines this phenomenon on social media, which are fundamentally platforms for constructing and performing social identities. To explicate the nature of political identity ownership, we develop a typology of political identity appeals within campaign advertisements on social media. We apply this schema to a quantitative content analysis of 2020 presidential candidate ads on Facebook, quantifying the scope and nature of in-group and out-group political identity appeals. Understanding social media as vehicles primarily for the construction and maintenance of identity – in political ads and beyond – is fundamental for assessing under which conditions social media can be good, bad, and/or downright ugly for a society and for democracy. While “identity politics” has lately been hurled as a pejorative in the public sphere, its origin in the Combahee River Collective Statement (Collective, 1977) arguing for civil and human rights for Black women helps underscore the myriad of ways in which identity can be evoked in movements both toward and from democracy.

Author

• Shannon C McGregor, University of North Carolina