Contentious Political Communication on Social Media

Open Access
- Author:
- Kim, Tae Gyoon
- Graduate Program:
- Political Science
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 13, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Cyanne Loyle, Major Field Member
Kevin Munger, Major Field Member
Bruce Desmarais, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Michael Nelson, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies
Sarah Rajtmajer, Outside Unit & Field Member - Keywords:
- Social Media and Politics
Political Communication
Contentious Politics
Political Violence
Public Policy
American Politics
Computational Social Science - Abstract:
- Despite the initial optimism concerning the democratic potential of social media platforms, recent years have seen increasing concerns about the divisive nature of political communication on those platforms. Focused on the U.S., I examine how political communication on social media can exacerbate partisan division, including violent hostility against the opposing party. In doing so, I highlight the roles ordinary partisans and party elites play in intensifying partisan division through their communication on social media. In the first chapter, I identify tweets threatening violence against opposing party elites and investigate substantive patterns associated with those tweets. I demonstrate that violent tweets closely track contentious politics offline. While rare, they spread widely through communication networks, reaching those without direct ties to violent users on the fringe of the networks. In the second chapter, I examine the impact of party elites’ violent rhetoric on mass support for violence against opposing partisans, in the context of political discussion on social media. Through an online survey experiment, I find that co-party elites’ rhetoric threatening violence increases mass support for violence, but there is no such effect when the same rhetoric comes from opposing party elites. No evidence is found for countervailing behavior against party elites’ violent rhetoric. In the third chapter, I turn my attention to subnational governments, examining state legislators’ framing and attention to the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter. I show that there is a deep elite partisan divide in both the framing and frequency of public discourse about the pandemic – a divide that will likely continue to shape public policies in the country. Together, my dissertation advances our understanding of partisanship, polarization, political violence, and public policy.