Longitudinal Relational Publics and their Discursive Overlap with Issue Publics

Coauthors: Ahana Bhattacharya, Holliday Sims, Kenneth Joseph

Online discussions of political issues do not always happen in spaces that are explicitly dedicated to political talk; these discourses may arise within a quilting group or on a sports fan page, for example. Whether or not bringing politics into ostensibly apolitical spaces is considered normatively desirable, it remains imperative that we understand who brings in such issues, under what circumstances, and with what degree of variation between spaces or actors. We therefore introduce a new theoretical construct, the longitudinal relational networked public (or, simply, the longitudinal public, which we define as the discourse produced by a socially connected set of creators, and the attention given to that discourse by their shared audience. By operationalizing the longitudinal public on network and post data from Twitter/X in 2020, we explore how politically relevant issues (fail to) permeate the discourses produced within these generally stable structures of attention. We find that a great deal of the heterogeneity in discursive overlap across longitudinal publics is explained by a broad typology, while audience age and partisanship also contribute some explanatory power. There is substantial heterogeneity in discursive overlap between kinds of political issues, over time (driven by relevant events), and even among the creators that comprise a single longitudinal public. Our findings indicate that understanding online public discourse requires precision in the constructs we deploy, as well as a willingness to consider the existence and validity of many constructs simultaneously.