‘Who, if not me?’ How political self-categorizations shape the meaning of political self-expression on social media as a citizenship norm

Abstract

ABSTRACT With political self-expression emerging as a prominent practice of political participation on social media platforms, scholars have hypothesized that this practice may have evolved into a norm and component of ‘good citizenship.’ Empirical findings, however, are inconclusive, as some young people express their politics out of a sense of civic duty, while others view this engagement as a waste of time. Based on the idea that how we define ourselves impacts the normative meanings that we attach to things in the social world, the study explores the role of social identities in people’s evaluations of expressive engagement. Empirically, the study is based on qualitative interview data with social media users in Serbia (n = 18). The findings show that engaging in political self-expression does not appear to be a citizenship norm but a personal norm in individuals with pronounced political self-concepts who perceive that their core self-category is at stake in the public discourse. Moreover, people employ social categorizations, such as ideology, partisanship, and social class, to evaluate the content and form of political self-expression as good or bad. Aside from issues of political self-expression, the study challenges the idea that individual understandings of what it means to be a good citizen are universal and static and that people’s subjective positionality in social contexts matters.