Personal Narratives Empower Politically Disinclined Individuals to Engage in Political Discussions

TL;DR

This study examines whether personal narratives can empower politically disinclined individuals to engage in online political discussions. By training a transformer-based classifier to detect first-person narratives and applying it to a large Reddit dataset, the authors compare PDIs with more active users and assess how personal narratives influence participation, replies, and perceived reception. The findings show PDIs are more likely to use personal narratives, respond to them, and return to discussions, with narratives helping to narrow the gap in community reception. Collectively, the work suggests personal narratives can broaden participation and foster more inclusive online political discourse, albeit with platform-design and moderation considerations to maximize positive impact.

Abstract

Engaging in political discussions is crucial in democratic societies, yet many individuals remain politically disinclined due to various factors such as perceived knowledge gaps, conflict avoidance, or a sense of disconnection from the political system. In this paper, we explore the potential of personal narratives-short, first-person accounts emphasizing personal experiences-as a means to empower these individuals to participate in online political discussions. Using a text classifier that identifies personal narratives, we conducted a large-scale computational analysis to evaluate the relationship between the use of personal narratives and participation in political discussions on Reddit. We find that politically disinclined individuals (PDIs) are more likely to use personal narratives than more politically active users. Personal narratives are more likely to attract and retain politically disinclined individuals in political discussions than other comments. Importantly, personal narratives posted by politically disinclined individuals are received more positively than their other comments in political communities. These results emphasize the value of personal narratives in promoting inclusive political discourse.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Percentage use of personal narratives across user activity (95 % CI). PDIs are more likely to use personal narratives than the most politically active users.
• Figure 2: Probability of receiving a reply from PDIs (95 % CI). Personal narrative comments are slightly more likely to get a response from PDIs.
• Figure 3: Probability of returning next month to political discussions for PDIs (95% CI). PDIs are more likely to return to political discussions in the next month if they employ personal narratives in the current month.
• Figure 4: Mean comment scores of users across different comment types (95% CI). PDIs are likely to score lower than comments by the most politically active users. Also, personal narrative comments by PDIs are likely to score higher than other comments made by the same users.