Political Shocks Asymmetrically Consolidate Right-Wing Communities on Twitter

The study in plain language

Do political crises reshape online communities in the same way? This study examines Twitter follow networks in France and Sweden around elections, protests, national crises and other major political events.

The paper reports that populist-right communities showed a relative advantage over other communities in changes to internal concentration in 10 of 13 events. Here, internal concentration means the share of a community’s follow ties within the observed network core that connect to accounts in the same community. A relative advantage can mean gaining more internal concentration or losing less than other communities.

The pattern was less consistent for the volume of inferred new ties, where the paper reports a relative advantage in 7 of 13 events. The two measures describe different aspects of network change: a community can become more inward-looking even while its overall tie formation declines.

Cumulative consolidation was clearest in Sweden. The French pattern was weaker and mixed, with only a modest cumulative gain for the right/sovereignist community.

How the analysis works

The study compares changes around each event in a populist-right community with the average change across other communities in the same network. It uses six months before each event and the event month plus six following months.

Follow dates were not directly observed. Their earliest possible timing was inferred from follow-list order and account creation dates, then grouped by month. Community labels drew on network structure, biography terms and, in Sweden, party-sphere composition.

The French temporal analysis uses a high-coverage core of 4,044 source accounts; the Swedish analysis uses 397,126 high-coverage source accounts. These differently constructed samples support a qualitative comparison, while limiting direct comparisons of effect sizes between countries.

Why it matters

The findings add a network-structure perspective to debates about online polarization. Researchers studying political homophily, crisis communication, populism or the development of online communities can use the paper to examine whether political shocks are associated with uneven changes across ideological groups.

The analysis also distinguishes the amount of tie formation from the concentration of those ties within a community—two outcomes that need not move together.