{"ID":2892321,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16858","arxiv_id":"2507.16858","title":"Who Leads in the Shadows? ERGM and Centrality Analysis of Congressional Democrats on Bluesky","abstract":"Following the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Democratic lawmakers and their supporters increasingly migrated from mainstream social media plat-forms like X (formerly Twitter) to decentralized alternatives such as Bluesky. This study investigates how Congressional Democrats use Bluesky to form networks of influence and disseminate political messaging in a platform environment that lacks algorithmic amplification. We employ a mixed-methods approach that combines social network analysis, expo-nential random graph modeling (ERGM), and transformer-based topic mod-eling (BERTopic) to analyze follows, mentions, reposts, and discourse pat-terns among 182 verified Democratic members of Congress. Our findings show that while party leaders such as Hakeem Jeffries and Elizabeth War-ren dominate visibility metrics, overlooked figures like Marcy Kaptur, Donald Beyer, and Dwight Evans occupy structurally central positions, suggesting latent influence within the digital party ecosystem. ERGM re-sults reveal significant homophily along ideological, state, and leadership lines, with Senate leadership exhibiting lower connectivity. Topic analysis identifies both shared themes (e.g., reproductive rights, foreign conflicts) and subgroup-specific issues, with The Squad showing the most distinct discourse profile. These results demonstrate the potential of decentralized platforms to reshape intra-party communication dynamics and highlight the need for continued computational research on elite political behavior in emerging digital environments.","short_abstract":"Following the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Democratic lawmakers and their supporters increasingly migrated from mainstream social media plat-forms like X (formerly Twitter) to decentralized alternatives such as Bluesky. This study investigates how Congressional Democrats use Bluesky to form networks of influence an...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16858","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16858v1","authors":"[\"Gordon Hew\",\"Ian McCulloh\"]","published":"2025-07-21T15:25:29Z","proceeding":"cs.SI","tasks":"[\"cs.SI\"]","methods":"[\"Transformer\"]","has_code":false}