Social Media, Moral Values and Politics: Evidence from the US

• In Event: Elections, Campaigns, and Social Media Mobilization

Abstract

This paper examines how social media, and the moral language used by political leaders on these platforms, affects electoral outcomes. Globally, more than 4 billion people use social media, making it a powerful tool for political messaging. With wide adoption by both politicians and their constituents (Petrova, Sen and Yildirim, 2021), social media has transformed political dynamics (Zhuravskaya, Petrova and Enikolopov, 2020). At the same time, social media is also an important avenue through which moral ideas are diffused (Brady et al., 2017). While recent work has documented that voters support politicians who closely reflect their moral values (Enke, 2020), our study seeks to understand whether social media plays a role in this relationship.

Using a new dataset of around 12 million tweets by more than 4,000 congressional candidates, we begin our analysis by describing how politicians’ social media use emerged and evolved over the last decade. We use text analysis and data on engagement to explore the supply and demand of moral rhetoric on Twitter. Our data reveals that moral content is prevalent in politicians' social media and that it has increased over time. We then use a set of fixed-effects regressions and a close elections regression discontinuity design (RDD) on politicians' characteristics, to study the relationship between social media use by congresional candidates and electoral outcomes. We find that having a Twitter account is positively associated with increased vote shares in general elections. Furthermore, this relationship is strongly heterogeneous depending on the use of moral rhetoric. Politicians with a higher share of moral content in their tweets perform disproportionately better in elections. Our results speak to one important mechanism through which social media affects political dynamics.

Authors

• Edoardo Grillo, University of Padova

• Juan S. Morales, Wilfrid Laurier University

• Alessandra Moresi, Collegio Carlo Alberto