Personal Narratives Empower Politically Disinclined Individuals to Engage in Political Discussions

2025-02-27

AI Summary

This study addresses the political disengagement of individuals in democratic societies—those who withdraw from political discourse due to knowledge gaps, conflict avoidance, or systemic alienation. Leveraging large-scale Reddit data, we develop a supervised text classifier to identify first-person personal narratives and employ behavioral analysis alongside controlled comparative experiments. Our findings—novel in this domain—reveal that politically disengaged users not only deploy personal narratives more frequently than their engaged counterparts but also experience significantly higher comment engagement and interaction retention when doing so. Moreover, such narratives elicit disproportionately positive community feedback within political subreddits, fostering greater dialogic inclusivity. These results empirically demonstrate that low-barrier narrative strategies effectively mitigate participation disparities, offering both methodological innovation—through scalable narrative detection—and actionable insights for designing more inclusive digital public spheres.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument Mining
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Sentiment analysis and opinion mining

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.

Problem

• Personal narratives increase political discussion participation.
• Narratives attract and retain politically disinclined individuals.
• Narratives receive positive reception in political communities.

Innovation

• Text classifier identifies personal narratives
• Large-scale computational analysis on Reddit
• Personal narratives boost political engagement