The Network of Celebrity Politics

Sungjin Park, Jihye Lee, Seungjin Ryu and Kyu S. Hahn

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2015, vol. 659, issue 1, 246-258

Abstract: With the rise of networked media such as Twitter, celebrities’ ability to speak on policy matters directly to the public has become amplified. We investigate the political implications of celebrity activism on Twitter by estimating the political ideology of thirty-four South Korean news outlets and fourteen political celebrities based on the co-following pattern among 1,868,587 Twitter users. We also had a rare opportunity to match their following behavior with individual-level attributes by relying on supplementary survey data on 11,953 members of an online survey panel. Our results reveal that celebrity following on Twitter is ideologically skewed; a vast majority of Korean Twitter users following politically influential celebrities are liberal. Additionally, survey results show that political celebrities are more likely to attract those lacking the ability to process one-sided information in a balanced manner.

Keywords: celebrity politics; Twitter: network analysis: polarization; news; political knowledge (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:659:y:2015:i:1:p:246-258

DOI: 10.1177/0002716215569226

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