2026 Theses Doctoral

"Lite Politics": Political Participation in the Era of Social Media

Bonini, Beatrice

This dissertation studies how social media platforms and influencer-centered communication environments reshape political engagement, political communication, and the broader process of political socialization in contemporary democracies. While digital platforms are often celebrated for lowering barriers to participation and increasing political awareness among younger generations, this dissertation argues that their most important effect may not be on the overall level of participation, but rather on its composition. In environments governed by visibility, engagement metrics, and algorithmic amplification, political behaviors that are highly observable, emotionally engaging, and easily shareable become systematically rewarded. As a result, social media platforms may increasingly privilege expressive and performative forms of participation over more demanding, less visible, and potentially more consequential forms of civic engagement.

The dissertation approaches this question through a combination of formal theory, experimental evidence, survey data, and observational analysis of social media content. The first chapter develops a formal political economy model of influencer political activation. The model studies how platform incentives affect influencers' decisions to engage politically and whether to promote online or offline forms of activism. It shows that platform-mediated environments increase incentives for highly visible forms of participation and can generate equilibrium patterns consistent with "slacktivism", particularly among individuals with intermediate levels of civic motivation.

The second chapter provides causal evidence on the effects of influencer-style political communication during the 2024 European Elections through a randomized controlled trial. The findings show that exposure to political content delivered in influencer-style formats does not substantially increase overall political engagement or substantially reshape broad political attitudes. Instead, it produces targeted effects by shifting issue salience, affecting symbolic evaluations of political actors, and increasing low-cost and highly visible forms of participation while leaving more demanding forms of engagement largely unchanged.

The third chapter examines the supply-side dynamics of political communication on social media by combining survey evidence from Italy with observational data on TikTok posts produced by U.S.-based influencers during the 2024 election cycle. Across both sources, political content is found to be relatively limited overall, but disproportionately composed of highly visible, expressive, and low-intensity forms of engagement. Influencer-driven political communication tends to emphasize actions that are easily displayed, circulated, and integrated into platform-native formats, while less observable and more demanding forms of participation remain comparatively underrepresented.

Taken together, the findings suggest that social media platforms reshape not only how politics is communicated, but also how political engagement itself is perceived, performed, and rewarded. The dissertation introduces the concept of "lite politics" to describe a form of political engagement shaped by visibility and platform incentives, in which expressive and performative participation becomes increasingly central. More broadly, the dissertation highlights how attention-driven communication environments may transform the meaning of political participation itself, with important implications for democratic citizenship, political socialization, and the future of civic engagement in the digital age.