The role of political ideology in dissociative behavior on social networking websites

Abstract

Social networks have long been studied from a political science perspective. Though the existing literature implies that people are exposed to opposing political views rather often, people also tend to associate with others like themselves. The growth of online social networking sites gives us the chance to analyze this associative and dissociative behavior at work in a digital context. In this thesis I propose a model that rests heavily on ideological extremity as a predictor of dissociative behaviors on social networking websites. The results reveal some evidence that indeed extreme political ideologues are more likely than their moderate cohorts to disassociate themselves from their online peers.