Carsten Schwemmer: The Rise of Political Influencers in Germany

Ort: Seidenstraße 36, Raum M 36.21 (2. OG)

Im Rahmen des Kolloquiums der Abteilung SOWI VII freuen wir uns ganz herzlich, Prof. Carsten Schwemmer (LMU) mit dem Vortrag "The Rise of Political Influencers in Germany" bei uns begrüßen zu dürfen.

The Rise of Political Influencers in Germany
Carsten Schwemmer & Magdalena Riedl

Despite an increasing information overflow in the era of digital communication, influencers manage to draw the attention of their followers with an authentic and casual appearance. Reaching large audiences on social media, they can be considered as digital opinion leaders. In the past, they have mostly acted as experts for topics like fashion, sports, or gaming and used their status to collaborate with brands for marketing purposes. However, since recently, influencers are also turning to more meaningful and political content. In this paper, we examine the role of political influencers in the 2021 federal election in Germany. Using social media data and crowdsourcing, we identify and analyze political influencers and their content on Instagram. We find that political influencers are indeed on the rise, seamlessly merging discussion of political content with product promotion in their posts. Moreover, we use an online survey of respondents in Germany to examine the potential of political influencers to influence election results. Our results suggest that their importance is small compared to other factors, but still sufficient in absolute terms to significantly change the outcome of the election.

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