Reconceptualising political influencers: an alternative means of definition and analysis

Recent interest in online political influencers has resulted in an array of competing definitions of who counts as a political influencer. Contending the value of a more porous and resilient definition able to recognise a spectrum of online political influence, we interrogate scholarship on opinion leadership, influentials, micro-celebrities, and social media influencer studies to reveal a range of identifying traits that can characterise different types of political influencers. Introducing a new approach to categorising these varied manifestations, we discuss six key attributes: personalised communication, compensation, audience size, political topical focus, control, and formal political role. Showing how this approach can be deployed to capture different manifestations of political influencers, we aim to build understanding that is resilient to change over time and that can support comparative empirical work.