Original title: The Influencer I’ll Vote For: Mapping Politicians and Parties on TikTok
Marcos Echevarria-Eirea · September 2026
Social media is becoming a key space for political information, but we know little about how leaders use TikTok across different countries. To find out, a researcher gathered TikTok accounts belonging to national politicians and political parties across 17 Western democracies. By analyzing around 260,000 posts, the study tracked who is on the app, how often they post, and how much audience engagementThe number of likes, comments, and shares a post receives, showing how much people interact with it. they get. The study found that radical party familiesGroups of political parties that share similar ideologies, like radical left, radical right, or mainstream. are more present, post more, and earn more engagement than mainstream parties. Specifically, the radical left leads most clearly in its share of accounts and posting volume. It also earns engagement levels similar to the radical right, though exact differences between those two radical groups depend on the metric.
You are at a school fair where each club sets up a booth. The most popular clubs are expected to have the biggest booths and attract the most visitors. But when you walk around, you notice that the smaller, more opinionated clubs have set up more booths, are handing out more flyers, and have longer lines. In this paper, the clubs are political parties, the fair is TikTok, and the booth size and visitor numbers represent their presence and engagement. The study finds that radical parties—the opinionated ones—are more active and popular on TikTok than the mainstream parties.
For voters, this means TikTok feeds may be skewed toward radical voices. For campaigners, it shows that mainstream parties are missing a key platform. For democracy, it raises questions about the balance of political visibility online.
The dataset covers only 17 Western democracies, so findings may not generalize globally. It focuses on presence and engagement, not on the content of posts or their impact on voters. It does not analyze causal effects or the quality of political discourse. The data is cross-sectional and may not capture changes over time.
Ask anything about this paper. Answers come from its abstract, and say so when the abstract doesn't cover your question.
The Influencer I’ll Vote For: Mapping Politicians and Parties on TikTok — Marcos Echevarria-Eirea — SocArXiv — doi:10.31235/osf.io/2bpur_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.