Who Leads in the Shadows? ERGM and Centrality Analysis of Congressional Democrats on Bluesky

TL;DR

This study analyzes how Democratic Congress members use Bluesky to form influence networks and disseminate messages, revealing central figures, ideological homophily, and discourse patterns in a decentralized social media environment.

Contribution

It introduces a mixed-methods approach combining ERGM, social network analysis, and topic modeling to study political influence and discourse on Bluesky among Congress members.

Findings

Party leaders dominate visibility metrics.

Latent influence exists among overlooked members.

Homophily influences network formation along ideological and state lines.

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.