I Voted, Therefore I Am: How Political Expressions on Social Media and Voting Actions Affect People’s Self-Concepts

When people engage in political actions, it affects not only their environment but also the individuals themselves. The latter form of impact is called self-effects. Initially studied in offline contexts (Pingree, 2007), social media renewed interest in this phenomenon (Valkenburg, 2017) as socially mediated political actions such as political talk or sharing political posts have been found to affect people’s self concepts (Lane et al., 2019; Ward et al., 2022). While various online political actions seem to trigger self-effects, it remains unclear which specific actions can have long-lasting effects on people’s self-perceptions. We conducted a two-wave study in the context of the US Election 2024. This study aims to explore whether voting, as a fundamental democratic act, can induce self-effects. Given that voting is inherently an anonymous action, we hypothesize that especially sharing one’s voting behavior and engaging in political expression on social media may reinforce the self-concept linked to voting, thereby amplifying its self-effects. Taken together, we argue that the interplay of voting and social media communication has the potential to act as the starting point of a reinforcing democratic spiral that goes beyond the single act of voting.