Embeddedness, Social Contagion, and Vote Choice in the 2022 U.S. Senate Elections

The growing availability of data from social media sites has allowed for in-depth studies on online political behavior. In particular, estimating whether belief in far-right conspiracy theories leads to better or worse electoral outcomes for the Republican parties has produced conflicting results. Borrowing from the literature on complex contagion, we turn to data extracted from Twitter to study the correlation between the network of contacts of Republican users and electoral outcomes in the November 2022 U.S. Senate elections. We find that the clustering coefficient of Republican supporters is significantly and positively associated with higher levels of support for GOP candidates in these races. However, the impact of embeddedness in social networks varies depending on whether candidates in these races were explicitly endorsed by former President Donald Trump.