The More I Post, The More I Become: Expression of Exclusionary National Identity and Vote for Radical-right Parties in the Digital Age

This article maps the mechanism by which social media use may contribute to radical-right voting among individuals. Across Europe, there has been a rise in the electoral support for radical-right parties since the worst financial crisis of 2008 after the 1930s Great Depression and the worst refugee crisis of 2015 after World War II. Advances in digital communication have allowed radical-right parties to turn these crises into ideological debates centering on an exclusionary national identity, which promotes the binaries of “us vs them” and propagates xenophobia and even violence. Several research disciplines have identified links between social media and this electoral success. The party politics literature shows social media design allows direct targeting of potential voters through decentralized platforms while fuelling misinformation and hate speech in an unregulated media environment. Political sociologists have focused on algorithms that amplify individual exposure and self-selection into filter bubbles and echo chambers, leading to polarisation and extreme segregation along group and partisan lines. However, this research still treats the new media environment as the traditional public sphere occupied by politicians and large media organisations who controlled national narratives, instead of recognising the technological shift that has transformed the voters from passive audiences to media creators themselves. This leaves the main mechanism connecting social media design to individual vote choices unexplained. On the other hand, scholars of digital communication have found social media use is high among those who are unwillingness to engage in face-to-face interactions, find gratification in reinventing one’s personality in virtual platforms and have a greater urge to present a self-identity online. Radical-right propaganda always had a voice in conservative print and television mediums that were quite popular and allowed the creation of ideological echo chambers through self-selection and exposure. What was missing was the potential of individuals to voice their opinion, with the values they attach to the nation, openly, and develop networks with other like-minded citizens to find legitimisation for these ideas, or in short, expression and validation of who they consider themselves to be. Therefore, bridging the political and sociological research with the digital communication literature, I advance the mechanism of self-presentation and self-expression of identities online to explain radical-right voting among those individuals who were earlier marginalised for such an identity and had no outlet to share and develop this identity. I argue that with long-term social media use, individuals learn to express this latent exclusionary nationalist identity and find legitimisation for it in like-minded networks, which then leads them to support parties that advance the same ideology. This also implies that social media has a greater mobilising effect on those with exclusionary national identity than for those who could freely express their national identity in the past. Relying on an original dataset of 12,000 individuals across six European nations, that measures social media use, vote choices, national identities, personality traits, political values, and socio-economic backgrounds, the study shows how and under what contexts social media use leads to vote for radical-right parties.