To express or not express: a motivational approach to studying political expression on social media

Is political expression on social media motivated by a sincere desire to affect political change or is it a means for the politically obsessed to engage more deeply in politics? We propose an approach to studying people’s motivations for expressing themselves politically in social media environments, which identifies trait-level motivations (e.g. political involvement; Krupnikov & Ryan, 2022) as structuring state-level motivations (e.g. instrumental vs. social goal-seeking). Guided by this approach, we conducted a mixed-methods study of 850 Americans. The quantitative portion of the study identified motivational classes: “Passionate Participators” (25.49%; highly politically involved and adopting a diverse set of state-level motivations), “Expressive Defenders” (36.81%; moderately politically involved, motivated to combat discrimination and inform others), and “Awareness Raisers” (37.70%; low in political involvement, motivated by raising awareness). A qualitative thematic analysis of open-ended responses identified emergent motivational themes: 1) regulating and expressing emotions, 2) correcting misinformation and discourse,& 3) managing relationships. Integrating findings from both analyses, we offer insights into the structure of motivations for political expression on social media and highlight motivational forces that arise from the interaction between social media technologies and contemporary politics.