The Causal Effects of Social Media Interactions on Immigrant Partisan Attitudes

• In Event: The Rhetoric of Race

Abstract

Do interactions with friends on social media influence the partisan preferences of new immigrant constituencies in the U.S.? A theory of social transmission predicts that immigrants develop political orientations through the diffusion of the views of peers, rather than through the family. This paper tests this theory by studying Asian Americans, a growing immigrant group that increasingly supports Democrats in national elections. Using a randomized experiment, I simulate partisan interactions on social media between the friends of 650 Asian American and white (comparison group) college students, testing for the effects on partisan preferences. This experiment is methodologically innovative, employing a panel design that leverages respondents’ referrals of friends to produce hypothetical social media posts. These posts represent a partisan interaction within a subset of respondents’ actual social networks. In the first wave, respondents refer several friends for the study. In the second wave, they are exposed to a pro-Democratic partisan social media post. The design varies the nature and content of the social media post with six experimental conditions. I manipulate whether the post contains an article headline (control), or the same headline with user comments from a subset of their referred friends (treatment). These conditions are crossed with the content of the partisan message (affective or racial) and the racial composition of the commenters (for treatment only – mostly Asian or non-Asian). I test for the effects on party-feeling thermometers and other measures of partisanship. This work contributes a direct causal test, using an inventive experimental design, of a novel theory of the political socialization of new immigrant groups. The results also have important implications for understanding the political behavior of Asian Americans, the fastest growing immigrant group in the U.S.

Author

• Tanika Raychaudhuri, Princeton University