SOCIAL MEDIA & YOUNG VOTERS

summary

Young people increasingly encounter politics in digital environments that differ fundamentally from the traditional channels through which previous generations were politically socialized. My research examines how these changing information environments shape young citizens’ political attitudes and electoral behavior—and how young voters can be effectively engaged and equipped to navigate them.

One strand of this research examines the political behavior of younger generations, including the growing gender gap in far-right support. Our research shows that the recent electoral success of far-right parties among young Europeans is particularly pronounced among young men, pointing to important changes in the political attitudes and voting behavior of younger generations.

A second strand focuses on the changing ways in which young citizens encounter and engage with politics. We study the growing role of social media and digital opinion leaders in electoral politics, including whether social influencers can affect election outcomes. At the same time, we examine whether traditional campaign tools can still mobilize first-time voters in an increasingly digital political environment. A large-scale field experiment during the 2024 European Parliament election found no evidence that partisan direct mail increased turnout or support for the sending party among young voters.

Finally, we investigate how democratic resilience in digital environments can be strengthened. In a large preregistered experiment during the 2025 German federal election, we tested a brief digital literacy intervention designed to help users recognize emotional manipulation in political short-form videos. The intervention reduced liking and increased reporting of emotionally manipulative political content in the short term, while encouraging more attentive engagement with political videos. These findings suggest that brief and scalable digital literacy interventions can help citizens respond more critically to manipulative political communication, although the behavioral effects did not systematically persist over time.

Together, these projects seek to understand how digital transformation is reshaping the political development of younger generations and which strategies can strengthen their informed and resilient participation in democratic politics.

Research in this area has been (partly) funded by:

related publications

2025

The Mobilization of Young Voters: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Frederik Thieme and Heike Klüver

Jul 2025

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Can traditional campaign tools still mobilize young voters in the digital age? Despite the widespread use of direct mail in election campaigns, we lack causal evidence on whether party-sent letters influence first-time voters — an electorally crucial group whose initial vote choices can shape long-term political behavior. We address this question through a large-scale field experiment conducted in collaboration with a major German parliamentary party during the 2024 European Parliament election. Randomizing the distribution of 37,000 letters across zip-code areas in Berlin, we estimate the causal effects of partisan direct mail on turnout and vote choice. We find that the campaign had no detectable effect on electoral participation or vote share for the sending party, a result confirmed by individual-level data from a post-election survey. These null findings challenge the effectiveness of conventional mobilization tactics among digitally native cohorts and underscore the need to reassess established strategies for engaging first-time voters in contemporary democracies.
@misc{thieme_mobilization_2025, title = {The {Mobilization} of {Young} {Voters}: {Evidence} from a {Field} {Experiment}}, author = {Thieme, Frederik and Klüver, Heike}, year = {2025}, month = jul, doi = {10.31219/osf.io/c3nqj_v1}, url = {https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/c3nqj_v1}, urldate = {2025-07-13}, language = {en}, }
The Youth Gender Gap in Support for the Far Right

Ðorđe Milosav, Zachary Dickson, Sara B. Hobolt, Heike Klüver, Theresa Kuhn, and Toni Rodon

Journal of European Public Policy, Mar 2025

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The 2024 European Parliament election showcased a surprising new trend. While progressive parties have traditionally done well among younger voters, it was far-right parties that enjoyed unprecedented electoral support among young voters in the 2024 EP elections. Analyzing data from the European Election Studies (EES) 2024, covering 27 countries and almost 25,000 voters, this paper shows that there is a sizable gender gap in voting for the far right. The electoral success of far-right parties among young voters is primarily driven by the support of young men, peaking at over 21% of all young men in 2024 compared to only about 14% among women of the same age cohort. Descriptive analyses from the EES shows that this gap can partially be explained by attitudinal differences, with young women holding more socially progressive views than young men. Age-Period-Cohort models based on EES data covering eight elections from 1989 to 2024 further reveal that this gender gap is greatest for Millennials and Generation Z. Since political attitudes and voting behaviour during the formative years may have a long-lasting effect on voting patterns and attitudes later in life, our findings have important implications for the future of European democracies.
@article{milosav_youth_2025, title = {The {Youth} {Gender} {Gap} in {Support} for the {Far} {Right}}, author = {Milosav, Ðorđe and Dickson, Zachary and Hobolt, Sara B. and Klüver, Heike and Kuhn, Theresa and Rodon, Toni}, year = {2025}, month = mar, journal = {Journal of European Public Policy}, pages = {1--25}, doi = {10.1080/13501763.2025.2481181}, issn = {1350-1763, 1466-4429}, url = {https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13501763.2025.2481181}, urldate = {2025-05-15}, language = {en}, }

2024

Social Influencers and Election Outcomes

Heike Klüver

Comparative Political Studies, Dec 2024

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Do social influencers affect election outcomes? Social influencers can reach millions of people through social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. However, research on social influencers is scarce and it is unclear whether they can affect elections. I argue that social influencers can influence elections through their role as digital opinion leaders and their power to shape the public agenda. Empirically, this study leverages an event that occurred during the 2019 European election campaign. Eight days before the 2019 EP election, the social influencer Rezo published a video in which he severely attacks the christian democratic CDU/CSU which was watched by over 11.5 million users until the election. Based on a differences-in-differences design, it is shown that the video had a sizeable effect on the election resulting in considerable vote losses for the CDU/CSU. The results are important for the debate on electoral competition and social media.
@article{kluver_social_2024, title = {Social {Influencers} and {Election} {Outcomes}}, author = {Klüver, Heike}, year = {2024}, month = dec, journal = {Comparative Political Studies}, pages = {00104140241306955}, doi = {10.1177/00104140241306955}, issn = {0010-4140, 1552-3829}, url = {https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00104140241306955}, urldate = {2025-05-09}, language = {en}, data = {https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/0TRHTG}, }