A Repertoire Approach to Studying Inequalities in Political Social Media Use

This paper adopts a repertoire approach to studying inequalities in political use of social media, focusing on patterns of political behavior on Facebook. A Latent Class Analysis of a 2016 two-wave survey of Americans identified four distinct political repertoires on Facebook; 1) Disengaged, 2) All-engaged, 3) Expressers (only likely to do expressive behaviors) and 4) Likers (only likely to “like” content). Using these classes of users, we reexamined prominent hypotheses in the literature related to whether political social media use is a) stratified by education and political interest and b) associated with increased political knowledge and participation.