Economic Topics Gained Attention Only After the Election
Research
09.04.2025
ZEW Analysis of the Political Discourse on Bluesky Ahead of the 2025 Federal Election
In the run-up to the federal election, economic topics played only a minor role on the short messaging service Bluesky. However, following the election, the number of posts related to the economy rose significantly. This is the result of a new analysis by ZEW Mannheim, which evaluated more than 90,000 short messages posted on Bluesky.
“Twitter used to reliably reflect public debates. When Twitter became platform X and major changes emerged regarding its algorithm and user base, Bluesky established itself as an alternative. But it remained unclear to what extent this relatively new competitor platform would be suitable for the analysis of debates. Our results show, on the one hand, that the political discourse on Bluesky reflects current events and, on the other hand, that Bluesky is a suitable medium for empirically examining political debates,” says study author Jacob Schildknecht from ZEW’s “Digital Economy” Research Unit.
Shift in topics after the election
Only five per cent of the relevant posts before the election addressed economic topics. The most frequently discussed economic issues in these short messages were labour and social policy, environmental and energy policy, and digital infrastructure.
After the federal election, the proportion of posts related to economic topics on Bluesky more than doubled. Posts related to the economy then made up over 13 per cent of all the election-related content. They focused particularly on fiscal and monetary policy. In contrast, areas such as environmental and energy policy, labour and social policy and housing policy declined significantly in statistical terms.
“This shows that the political debate on Bluesky reflected the current developments. Beyond the specific empirical results, we also see that Bluesky is a suitable social media platform for tracking and empirically analysing political discourse,” explains Schildknecht.
Over 90,000 posts
For the ZEW brief analysis, more than 90,000 Bluesky posts were examined during the period from 23 January to 22 February 2025, and then from 24 February to 10 March 2025. These posts included hashtags related to political parties participating in the election, such as #cdu or #spd. The identified posts were then analysed to determine whether their content related to specific economic policy areas. The policy areas were fiscal and monetary policy; environment and energy; labour and social affairs; housing and real estate; public policy; digital infrastructure; market competition; financial markets and industry.
