Party polarization in digital fingerprints: Tracing politicians’ social media posts on the George Floyd protests

Under what conditions do politicians express their views on social media? How do politicians express their opinions around a given issue on social media? This paper contends that issue ownership and electoral accountability are critical factors that drive politicians’ attitudes toward a politically salient issue. It conducts a case study on the 2020 George Floyd protests in the United States, using an original, computationally-gathered dataset of posts on Twitter. The multi-level analysis results suggest that politicians’ race and party affiliation, in conjunction with their constituencies’ partisan orientation and racial composition, played significant roles in determining the frequency of Floyd-related Twitter posts they shared. Additionally, topic modeling results demonstrate a disparity in how the political movement is phrased between Democrats and Republicans. These findings shed light on the motivations behind social media posting behavior by public officials and carry significant implications for party polarization in contemporary democracies.