Social Media and Political Participation – Global

The global explosion in the use of social media presents unparalleled opportunities for interdisciplinary research. Building on the infrastructure provided by NYU’s National Science Foundation funded Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) lab, SMaPP-Global bring together an international team of scholars to pursue three interrelated goals: (1) to better understand how social media impacts political participation; (2) to better understand how elites utilize social media to pursue political goals; and (3) to develop open-source tools that facilitate the use of social media data for the study of politics.

Topics of inquiry may include: (a) what affects how likely political messages on social media are to be shared; (b) how and under what conditions social media contribute to political participation (ranging from low-cost activities such as voting or donating to a campaign to higher-cost activities such as actively participating in campaigns and protesting on the streets); (c) establishing the mechanisms by which social media influence political participation (e.g., by providing information vs. motivation); (d) developing methods for using social media to estimate public opinion on political issues; (e) studying, and developing tools to study, how non-democratic regimes respond to online opposition; and (f) (e) understanding how politics are likely to change as social media becomes more prevalent globally.

Project Members

Principal Investigator: Joshua Tucker (NYU)

  • Yindalon Aphinyanaphongs (NYU)
  • Eytan Bakshy (Facebook)
  • Pablo Barbera (NYU)
  • Nick Beauchamp (Northeastern)
  • Richard Bonneau (NYU)
  • Rumi Chunara (NYU)
  • Dean Eckles (MIT)
  • Ruben Enikolopov (Barcelona IPEG)
  • Juliana Freire (NYU Tandon)
  • Sandra González-Bailón (UPenn)
  • Samuel Gosling (Texas)
  • Philip Habel (Glasgow)
  • Curtis Hardin (Brooklyn College)
  • Stefano Iacus (Milan)
  • John Jost (NYU),
  • Jonathan Nagler (NYU)
  • Jennifer Pan (Stanford)
  • James Pennebaker (Texas)
  • Maria Petrova (Barcelona IPEG)
  • Adam Ramey (NYU Abu Dhabi)
  • Molly Roberts (UCSD)
  • David Rothschild (Microsoft Research)
  • Yannis Theocharis (Mannheim)
  • Cristian Vaccari (Royal Holloway, University of London)