The Impact of Social Capital on Political Communication in Neighborhood Online Communities

In the digital age, neighborhood communication has shifted to the online space, altering the traditional nature of interactions. This raises questions about the applicability of traditional knowledge about neighborhoods to their online counterparts. This study examines the impact of social capital within online neighborhood communities on political communication among their members. To do so, we analyzed the digital footprints of online neighborhood communities in the city of Volgograd, including all districts and types of buildings. Using machine learning techniques for natural language processing and network analysis, we examined over 79,000 posts over a 17-year period to evaluate the impact of both structural and relational dimensions of social capital. The results indicated that the characteristics of social capital in online communities influence political communication in a similar way to traditional interactions. A sense of community, high density, and the clustering of the network, as well as the presence of key intermediary nodes, contribute to discussions about political topics. This suggests that digital platforms can replicate the social mechanisms found in offline environments, and that previously accumulated knowledge about the impact of neighborhoods on political participation can be applied in a digital context.

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