Podcasts in the Periphery: Tracing Guest Trajectories in Political Podcasts

Social networks structure the flow of political information that is critical for civic participation and individual decision making, simultaneously opening and constraining the diffusion of ideas and information. Understanding the current information landscape is pressing given the current salience of false and misleading information. Given the growing prominence of podcasts within the information ecosystem, and the high levels of trust that podcasters enjoy from listeners, it is critical to better understand the role this medium plays in political communication. In this paper, we construct a bipartite network of podcasts and their invited guests. We then generate a network of paths that guests take as they move from one podcast to the next using entailment analysis, and evaluate if guests are typically invited to speak on less prominent shows first, before moving on to more prominent shows. This dynamic has several parallels to Centola’s power of the periphery hypothesis, complimented by the idea that guests may visit progressively more prominent podcasts as they themselves become more visible. We also find that shows aiming to feature a politically diverse set of guests on their own shows play an outsize role in brokering the movement of guests between liberal and conservative shows, although this cross-boundary brokerage has equivocal outcomes.