Podcasts in the Periphery: Tracing Guest Trajectories in Political Podcasts

Social networks structure the flow of political information that is critical for civic participationand individual decision making, simultaneously opening and constraining the diffusion of ideas andinformation. Understanding the current information landscape is pressing given the current salience offalse and misleading information. Given the growing prominence of podcasts within the informationecosystem, and the high levels of trust that podcasters enjoy from listeners, it is critical to betterunderstand the role this medium plays in political communication. In this paper, we construct abipartite network of podcasts and their invited guests. We then generate a network of paths that gueststake as they move from one podcast to the next using entailment analysis, and evaluate if guests aretypically 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, complimentedby the idea that guests may visit progressively more prominent podcasts as they themselves becomemore visible. We also find that shows aiming to feature a politically diverse set of guests on theirown shows play an outsize role in brokering the movement of guests between liberal and conservativeshows, although this cross-boundary brokerage has equivocal outcomes.