Polarized Without the Other Side: Measurements from Congress on Bluesky

<p>Political polarization seems to be rising at an alarming rate in the United States. Those on opposite sides of the political spectrum are increasingly viewing each other more negatively, with this effect amplified in the rhetoric of elected officials. In this research, I examine social media posts from Democratic representatives on Bluesky, a growing social media platform with a mostly liberal user base. I collect a novel dataset directly from Bluesky and construct several independent variables. These include 4 distinct measures of polarization (positivity, affective polarization, issue polarization, and cross-party mentions), an indicator for house membership, and 4 indicators for salient policy-related content (science, economic, healthcare, and governance). I model the predicted effect of each variable on like-count and reply-count while controlling for the number of account followers. Results indicate that 3 of the 4 polarization variables significantly predict an increase in engagement. House membership significantly predicts less engagement. Finally, I find mixed results for the policy-related variables, leading to a discussion about future research on user engagement. These results show that the engaging effect of polarizing speech, found in previous literature, is robust even on a partisan platform without users from the other side of the aisle.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (MA)

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters Thesis

Year dc:date.available

2025

Author dc:creator

• Derr, Brandon

Contributors dc:contributor

• Iliyan Iliev
• Marek Steedman
• Joseph Weinberg

• social media
• polarization
• Bluesky
• Congress
• American Politics

Repository record dc:identifier

https://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses/1159

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:aquila.usm.edu:masters_theses-2257