Explaining one’s identity: ideological and national variation in self-representation in social media

This study examines how followers of Members of Parliament (MPs) from eight EU member states express their socio-political identities through social media. In contrast to existing approaches that focus on posts and threads, our method highlights how users' digital self-presentation and group identity cues conveyed through bios reflect broader socio-political participation and discourse within the EU public sphere. We treat these bios not only as proxies for the stances, views, and priorities of politically engaged European citizens but also as expressions of how groups construct and communicate their socio-political identities through narratives, in relation to wider socio-political discourse and participation. Our goal is to explore both commonalities and differences in the topic proportions across EU countries, and in topic contents used by left- and right-wing users to express their identities. To achieve this, we combine a Structural Topic Model (STM) with attitudinal embeddings, drawing our topic seed words from the Manifesto Project's annotated data and ontology. By grounding our topics in this well-established and systematised framework for analysing political discourse, we enhance the scope and interpretability of our results. This methodology allows us to map how discourse in users' bios varies by political orientation and other dimensions of interest, revealing how European group identity narratives are socialised and co-constructed in online environments.