Reaching across the political aisle: overcoming challenges in using social media for recruiting politically diverse respondents

A challenge for survey research is achieving representativeness across demographic groups. We test the extent to which ideological alignment with a survey’s sponsor shapes differential partisan response and individuals’ decisions to participate in a study recruited using Facebook advertisements. While the use of social media advertisements for recruitment has recently increased and offers benefits, it can present difficulties in obtaining politically representative samples. Taking an audit approach, we recruit respondents for a survey through two otherwise identical advertisements associated with New York University (from a liberal state) or the University of Mississippi (from a conservative state). Contrary to expectations, we do not find an asymmetry in completion rates between self-reported Democrats and Republicans based on sponsor, nor do we find statistically significant differences in respondent attitudes between the sponsors when we control for observables. We discuss implications for social media recruitment strategies to enhance the representativeness of online survey samples.

Recommended citation: Macdonald, M., Brown, M. A., Asimovic, N., Majumdar, R., Song, L., Huber, L., Graham, S., Budiman, A., Tucker, J. A., Nagler, J. (2025). Reaching across the political aisle: overcoming challenges in using social media for recruiting politically diverse respondents. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2025.2598616
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