Platforms of Division: The Role of Social Media in Shaping Electoral Polarization

Publication Date

2025

College

College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences

Department

Political Science, Department of

Student Level

Undergraduate

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Nathan Griffith

Presentation Type

Talk/Oral

Summary

Over recent years, social media platforms have continued to grow and evolve, providing new avenues for political messaging and participation among the electorate. As social media platforms become more prevalent in daily life, the debate over the extent to which social media plays in exacerbating polarization continues to be unsettled. Research spanning the past two decades have argued for different levels of the influence of social media, ranging from ideas of social media as a direct tool for exacerbating polarization to social media having little to no influence on polarization. Although scholarship on this debate continues to expand, little has been done to examine whether social media can be classified as having an independent influence on polarization. I propose that social media does act as an independent influencer on polarization among the electorate, rather than just as a reflection of polarization caused by institutional factors. In order to test and analyze this proposition, I utilize data from the 2020 Time Series Study produced by the American National Election Studies, focusing on questions dealing with social media usage, political affiliation, and partisan hostility. Using this data, I conduct a multinominal logistic regression to highlight the independent effect of different potential driving forces behind polarization.

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