A Multidimensional Analysis of Political Homophily Among Politically Active Twitter Users in Uruguay

Abstract

A key focus in the study of digital and social media in politics has been to investigate the homophily of online interactions and content exposure, often framed as the extent to which these platforms operate as echo chambers. However, research in this area has yielded mixed findings. One possible explanation is that the degree of homophily in online behavior varies depending on the specific type of behavior examined. This paper contributes to this debate by measuring multiple indicators of political homophily within the same sample. We identified a near-census list of ∼44,000 politically active Twitter (now X) users in Uruguay and retrieved all their interactions—including retweets, replies, quotes, and likes—over a defined period between 2021 and 2022, along with the accounts they follow. This dataset, comprising 7,172,636 tweets, 9,711,053 likes, and 13,660,197 following links allows us to assess the extent of political homophily across four dimensions: following behavior, interactions among ordinary users, interactions with elites, and media consumption. Our study makes three key contributions. First, it fills the gap of a single study that estimates different outcomes of political homophily in online communication using the same sample. Second, it focuses on politically active users who play a central role in shaping online political discourse. Third, it extends research beyond the typical U.S. and Western European cases by examining Uruguay, a country with a stable party system, strong partisan attachments, and low affective polarization. Our findings show that while politically active users are not completely isolated within echo chambers they exhibit a strong tendency toward homophily while confirming expected variation across dimensions noted in previous research. This pattern of high homophily persists even in a setting of low affective polarization. These results highlight the nuanced ways political homophily manifests across different behaviors and settings.