The last panel at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town for today is on political influencers, and we start with Leiyuan Tian and Fan Liang’s scoping review of influencer concepts, theories, and roles. Political influencers have been research across various contexts, of course, but they remain poorly defined: for example, they may be grassroots or established actors – becoming well-known and developing personal brands through social media activity, or alternatively using their existing visibility as politicians or journalists to branch out into influencer roles.
Political influencers may also no longer always be human actors: AI influencers are becoming increasingly visible on social media platforms, and are being deployed in part for populist propaganda. Also, while much of the focus has been on Western democracies, this is not the only context in which influencers are active: they also exist in perhaps different forms in authoritarian contexts including China, India, Indonesia, and other countries.
So, we need to conceptualise (or reconceptualise) political influencers, and identify their key attributes – these may be personalised communication, monetary or other compensation, audience size, definitions of what count as political, formal political roles, and control, but how these are configured for specific types of influencers might vary considerably, and what outcomes and effects they produce might be very type-specific.
This project reviewed journal articles between 2016 and 2025 that addressed political influencers, political opinion leaders, and politically influential persons; after screening this resulted in a corpus of some 176 articles which directly addressed the phenomenon.
Patterns emerging from this include a focus on key social media journals, on the US and the broader Global North, on publications since 2022, on key platforms Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, and on mixed-methods research. Key definitions are as digital opinion leaders, digital-savvy leaders, and other diverse descriptions. Research explores both negative and positive consequences of such influencer work.
