Behind the Roles We Play: How U.S. Politicians’ Social Media Narrative Identity Relates to Their Dissent Voting Behavior

Inspired by the theoretical tension between Goffman’s frontstage self-presentation and McAdams’s narrative identity theory, this study investigated if politicians’ public social media personas are strategic performances or reflect an internalized identity predicting backstage political behavior. We examined this authenticity paradox via U.S. legislators’ dissent voting, linking the language in 3.26 million tweets from 680 U.S. House Representatives (115th–118th Congresses) to 1.32 million roll-call votes. We used different natural language processing and network analysis techniques to measure narrative (agency, communion) and social identities (partisan interaction, structural holes) with fixed-effects panel models to observe that frontstage narratives predict backstage actions. Both agency and communion on Twitter were significantly associated with more dissent voting. Social identity, particularly higher inter-party interaction and spanning inter-party structural holes (lower Burt’s constraint), also positively predicted dissent. Mediation analysis confirmed social identity factors as key mechanisms linking narrative identity to dissent behavior. These findings suggest politicians’ self-narratives are public narratives that help to internalize an identity, shaping a self-concept that drives identity-congruent political action.