When the Personal Becomes the Political: Examining Political Engagement on Social Media.

Abstract

Numerous scholars have examined how political and informational uses of social media contribute to on- and offline political participation, but little is known about how non-political social media practices and social media network contexts shape political behaviors on such sites in everyday social media use. Drawing on a theoretical framework that views “the political” as an extended terrain of “the personal,” this dissertation examines the relationships between passive (i.e., consuming content) and active (i.e., producing content) forms of non-political and political social media use, and investigates the extent to which these associations are stratified by political interest, education, and age, using two separate adult samples of Facebook and Twitter users. With the same focus on everyday social media use, a survey experiment is conducted to investigate the impact of network prime—when users are primed with Facebook network size, diversity (i.e., the degree to which network members are evenly divided across classifications of social groups), and perceived political similarity to groups of connections on Facebook—on users’ willingness to react to political mobilization messages in various ways. The findings presented in this dissertation show that forms of non-political social media use differentially associate with political behaviors on the sites, and that these relationships are not always contingent on political interests, education, and age. In addition to social media practices, social media network contexts also shape political behaviors, such that network prime suppresses users’ willingness to actively engage with certain political mobilization requests. These results broadly support the conceptualization of “the political” as deeply embedded in “the personal,” raise both concerns and hopes for the future of political inequality, and highlight the importance of social contexts in shaping political behaviors on social media sites. Future research should continue to explore how different non-political social media practices and contexts influence behavioral and attitudinal political outcomes on and beyond social media sites.