ניר גרינברג

Political discourse now circulates through sprawling social media networks where multiple actors wield influence in addition to traditional elites. Yet scholarly conclusions about who actually shapes that discourse diverge because leading studies operationalize “political influencer” in fundamentally different ways. To clarify the stakes of those choices—and advance more coherent theorizing—we examine six definitions that are prevalent in the literature and are rooted in audience size, elite ties, network importance, and message engagement. We then apply these distinctive definitions to a single dataset, namely a panel of 597,815 registered U.S. voters on Twitter during the 2020 presidential campaign to identify convergence and divergence across definitions. Three patterns emerge. First, conceptual boundaries matter: definitions that differ in scale rarely converge on the same influencers, confirming that different lenses reveal largely distinct influencer groups. Second, definitional emphasis reshapes the portrait of influence itself: elite-based criteria surface highly political, centrally positioned senders with compact but engaged followings, whereas follower- and engagement-based criteria net vastly larger, more heterogeneous groups that address politics only episodically. Third, upstream choices about conceptual boundaries and definitional emphases cascade downstream to the characteristics of influencers’ audiences, producing systematic shifts in followers’ age, gender, racial, and partisan characteristics. By showing how conceptual decisions impact both who counts as a political influencer and which citizens follow their messages, this study lays the groundwork for clearer conceptualization of the relevant dimensions for advancing the accumulation of knowledge on this increasingly important political phenomenon.