Shanika L Wilson
Biographic Data
| ID | 202544 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shanika L Wilson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shanika L |
| FAMILY NAME | Wilson |
| SIGNATURE | WILSON S L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brandeis University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4046-1357 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 94 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
“We are 97%”
This article analyzes the network structure and content of local Telegram chats in Belarus using the theoretical framework of connective action logic. Using the data collected right at the aftermath of the protests, we created a bimodal network consisting of almost 800 local chats and over 440,000 unique users. This “network of networks” featured subnetworks within the country’s regions, towns, and city districts, as well as Belarusian diaspora, …
Populists in power
This study examines the inclusion-moderation thesis within the context of Israeli populism, focusing on how government participation influences the communication styles of populist legislators. By analyzing a comprehensive dataset of tweets from Israeli lawmakers between 2015 and 2022, we explore whether holding office leads to a moderation of populist rhetoric. Our findings indicate that while coalition members generally exhibit reduced populist…
Experts, coders and crowds
Political scientists increasingly use crowdworkers to produce data, predominantly in the context of coding researcher-curated text or to retrieve simple data from the internet. In this article, we provide a theoretical and empirical basis for understanding when crowdworkers can provide data of sufficient quality to substitute for other types of coders. First, we introduce a typology of data-producing actors – experts, trained coders and crowds – …
Measuring online political activity
Political engagement is deeply enmeshed with online activity. However, there has been a lack of publicly available cross-country datasets enabling researchers and policymakers to understand how politics and digital space intersect. This paper introduces the Digital Society Project (DSP), which aims to provide systematic, cross-country measurement of political institutions and behavior that manifest online or are affected by online activity. Using…
The Political Twittersphere as a Breeding Ground for Populist Ideas
This study employs a neural network approach to investigate the dissemination and content of populist ideas within the Israeli political Twittersphere. By analyzing a data set of Twitter activity by Israeli lawmakers from 2013 to 2022, the study reveals a consistent increase in the frequency and concentration of populist ideas, particularly among legislators from religious-nationalist parties. The analysis of the topical content of populist ideas…
Social Media as Social Science Data
Social media has put mass communication in the hands of normal people on an unprecedented scale, and has also given social scientists the tools necessary to listen to the voices of everyday people around the world. This book gives social scientists the skills necessary to leverage that opportunity, and transform social media's vast stream of information into social science data. The book combines the big data techniques of computer science with s…
Measuring Congressional Partisanship and Its Consequences
We develop a method for measuring a legislator’s partisanship using their Twitter rhetoric. To do so, we classify over 2.1 million tweets sent during two congressional terms (2015 through 2018) to determine how often members use explicitly partisan language. Since lawmakers are strategic in how they communicate with the public, we argue our approach captures a member’s partisan intensity, the time and effort they devote to supporting their party.…
Narrowing the Academic-Policy Divide
THERE IS ENDURING INTEREST IN making political science more relevant to policymakers and the public.1 Most political scientists seeking to bridge the academic-policymaker gap believe that the main obstacle they face is a failure of communication. According to this view, a significant amount of the research they conduct is potentially relevant to policymakers, but scholars struggle to engage key audiences. In other words, the problem is with the p…
Social media and vaccine hesitancy
BACKGROUND: Understanding the threat posed by anti-vaccination efforts on social media is critically important with the forth coming need for world wide COVID-19 vaccination programs. We globally evaluate the effect of social media and online foreign disinformation campaigns on vaccination rates and attitudes towards vaccine safety. METHODS: Weuse a large-n cross-country regression framework to evaluate the effect ofsocial media on vaccine hesita…
Mixing messages
How do candidates campaign on social media? To date, political scientists have mostly considered the content or tone of candidates’ social media posts. In this paper, we combine these research areas and study how candidates’ campaigns vary the content and tone of their messages. We argue incumbents emphasize positive issue content and limit attacking their opponent. Competitive races encourage positive mobilization posts and aggressive attack mes…
Norms and rage
The Methodology of “Varieties of Democracy” (V-Dem) 1
This article describes and discusses the new generation of methodological responses to measuring democracy and related issues generated by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). V-Dem is distinct in several regards in addition to its unique level of disaggregation, by the combination of: historical data extending back to 1900 and for a large selection among them to 1789 for many countries in the world; use of multiple, independent coders for each evalua…
Teaching Computerized Content Analysis for Undergraduate Research Papers
Content analysis is the process of turning text into data, with either automated or manual techniques, and it provides a feasible and attractive option for undergraduate students to develop and utilize original data. This article presents a cohesive framework for teaching computerized content analysis in undergraduate political science courses. The article discusses examples of how we have taught the techniques in our own classrooms and provides …
Modeling and measuring class conflict in Russia's regions
This article tests whether latent class conflict exists in Russia. It does so by theorizing that if class conflict exists, it should be reflected in the tax policy. The article constructs an original formal model of the authoritarian tax policy choice, finding equilibria in which the local government takes into account public sentiment even in the absence of elections, in an effect that resembles a market. This public sentiment is operationalized…
Policy leadership and re-election in the European Parliament
What determines the re-election of incumbent members of the European Parliament (MEPs)? Using Heckman probit models with sample selection to predict re-election in 2014, this contribution considers the impact of policy leadership, formal leadership, professional dedication, and seniority, and investigates the conditional effect of ballot structures. It finds that formal leadership only has a positive effect for party leaders elected from open lis…
Pinpointing the Powerful
This article introduces centrality in covoting networks as a measure of influence. Based on a simple cueing dynamic, it conceptualizes those lawmakers as most central—and thus as having the greatest signaling influence—who impact the greatest number of colleagues' voting decisions. A formal proof and an agent‐based simulation show that cue‐providers are always more central than followers; hence, we can use real‐world voting data to identify the m…
How to control the Internet
The spread of the Internet has had a profound impact on the social sciences, but understanding of how the engineering realities of the Internet’s construction shape its political effects still lags. This article presents a framework and rich examples from multiple countries in order to describe how national differences in the implementation of the Internet cause different strategic calculations by political actors. This paper’s goal is to provide…
Social identity, cross-cutting cleavages, and explaining the breakdown of interethnic cooperation
This article expands upon Fearon and Laitin's seminal Explaining Interethnic Cooperation, a paper that formalized an explanation for how ethnic groups achieve cooperation through the use of in-group policing strategies that yield a more stable and substantively convincing equilibrium than tit-for-tat (spiral) reprisals by each side. This article expands the Fearon and Laitin framework in two ways. First, it generalizes their basic framework of tw…
The Methodology of “Varieties of Democracy” (V-Dem) 1
This article describes and discusses the new generation of methodological responses to measuring democracy and related issues generated by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). V-Dem is distinct in several regards in addition to its unique level of disaggregation, by the combination of: historical data extending back to 1900 and for a large selection among them to 1789 for many countries in the world; use of multiple, independent coders for each evalua…
Policy leadership and re-election in the European Parliament
What determines the re-election of incumbent members of the European Parliament (MEPs)? Using Heckman probit models with sample selection to predict re-election in 2014, this contribution considers the impact of policy leadership, formal leadership, professional dedication, and seniority, and investigates the conditional effect of ballot structures. It finds that formal leadership only has a positive effect for party leaders elected from open lis…
Norms and rage
Mixing messages
How do candidates campaign on social media? To date, political scientists have mostly considered the content or tone of candidates’ social media posts. In this paper, we combine these research areas and study how candidates’ campaigns vary the content and tone of their messages. We argue incumbents emphasize positive issue content and limit attacking their opponent. Competitive races encourage positive mobilization posts and aggressive attack mes…
Measuring Congressional Partisanship and Its Consequences
We develop a method for measuring a legislator’s partisanship using their Twitter rhetoric. To do so, we classify over 2.1 million tweets sent during two congressional terms (2015 through 2018) to determine how often members use explicitly partisan language. Since lawmakers are strategic in how they communicate with the public, we argue our approach captures a member’s partisan intensity, the time and effort they devote to supporting their party.…
Measuring online political activity
Political engagement is deeply enmeshed with online activity. However, there has been a lack of publicly available cross-country datasets enabling researchers and policymakers to understand how politics and digital space intersect. This paper introduces the Digital Society Project (DSP), which aims to provide systematic, cross-country measurement of political institutions and behavior that manifest online or are affected by online activity. Using…
Pinpointing the Powerful
This article introduces centrality in covoting networks as a measure of influence. Based on a simple cueing dynamic, it conceptualizes those lawmakers as most central—and thus as having the greatest signaling influence—who impact the greatest number of colleagues' voting decisions. A formal proof and an agent‐based simulation show that cue‐providers are always more central than followers; hence, we can use real‐world voting data to identify the m…
Experts, coders and crowds
Political scientists increasingly use crowdworkers to produce data, predominantly in the context of coding researcher-curated text or to retrieve simple data from the internet. In this article, we provide a theoretical and empirical basis for understanding when crowdworkers can provide data of sufficient quality to substitute for other types of coders. First, we introduce a typology of data-producing actors – experts, trained coders and crowds – …
Narrowing the Academic-Policy Divide
THERE IS ENDURING INTEREST IN making political science more relevant to policymakers and the public.1 Most political scientists seeking to bridge the academic-policymaker gap believe that the main obstacle they face is a failure of communication. According to this view, a significant amount of the research they conduct is potentially relevant to policymakers, but scholars struggle to engage key audiences. In other words, the problem is with the p…
Teaching Computerized Content Analysis for Undergraduate Research Papers
Content analysis is the process of turning text into data, with either automated or manual techniques, and it provides a feasible and attractive option for undergraduate students to develop and utilize original data. This article presents a cohesive framework for teaching computerized content analysis in undergraduate political science courses. The article discusses examples of how we have taught the techniques in our own classrooms and provides …
Social identity, cross-cutting cleavages, and explaining the breakdown of interethnic cooperation
This article expands upon Fearon and Laitin's seminal Explaining Interethnic Cooperation, a paper that formalized an explanation for how ethnic groups achieve cooperation through the use of in-group policing strategies that yield a more stable and substantively convincing equilibrium than tit-for-tat (spiral) reprisals by each side. This article expands the Fearon and Laitin framework in two ways. First, it generalizes their basic framework of tw…
How to control the Internet
The spread of the Internet has had a profound impact on the social sciences, but understanding of how the engineering realities of the Internet’s construction shape its political effects still lags. This article presents a framework and rich examples from multiple countries in order to describe how national differences in the implementation of the Internet cause different strategic calculations by political actors. This paper’s goal is to provide…
Social identity, cross-cutting cleavages, and explaining the breakdown of interethnic cooperation
This article expands upon Fearon and Laitin's seminal Explaining Interethnic Cooperation, a paper that formalized an explanation for how ethnic groups achieve cooperation through the use of in-group policing strategies that yield a more stable and substantively convincing equilibrium than tit-for-tat (spiral) reprisals by each side. This article expands the Fearon and Laitin framework in two ways. First, it generalizes their basic framework of tw…
Policy leadership and re-election in the European Parliament
What determines the re-election of incumbent members of the European Parliament (MEPs)? Using Heckman probit models with sample selection to predict re-election in 2014, this contribution considers the impact of policy leadership, formal leadership, professional dedication, and seniority, and investigates the conditional effect of ballot structures. It finds that formal leadership only has a positive effect for party leaders elected from open lis…
Pinpointing the Powerful
This article introduces centrality in covoting networks as a measure of influence. Based on a simple cueing dynamic, it conceptualizes those lawmakers as most central—and thus as having the greatest signaling influence—who impact the greatest number of colleagues' voting decisions. A formal proof and an agent‐based simulation show that cue‐providers are always more central than followers; hence, we can use real‐world voting data to identify the m…
The Methodology of “Varieties of Democracy” (V-Dem) 1
This article describes and discusses the new generation of methodological responses to measuring democracy and related issues generated by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). V-Dem is distinct in several regards in addition to its unique level of disaggregation, by the combination of: historical data extending back to 1900 and for a large selection among them to 1789 for many countries in the world; use of multiple, independent coders for each evalua…
Teaching Computerized Content Analysis for Undergraduate Research Papers
Content analysis is the process of turning text into data, with either automated or manual techniques, and it provides a feasible and attractive option for undergraduate students to develop and utilize original data. This article presents a cohesive framework for teaching computerized content analysis in undergraduate political science courses. The article discusses examples of how we have taught the techniques in our own classrooms and provides …
Modeling and measuring class conflict in Russia's regions
This article tests whether latent class conflict exists in Russia. It does so by theorizing that if class conflict exists, it should be reflected in the tax policy. The article constructs an original formal model of the authoritarian tax policy choice, finding equilibria in which the local government takes into account public sentiment even in the absence of elections, in an effect that resembles a market. This public sentiment is operationalized…
Social media and vaccine hesitancy
BACKGROUND: Understanding the threat posed by anti-vaccination efforts on social media is critically important with the forth coming need for world wide COVID-19 vaccination programs. We globally evaluate the effect of social media and online foreign disinformation campaigns on vaccination rates and attitudes towards vaccine safety. METHODS: Weuse a large-n cross-country regression framework to evaluate the effect ofsocial media on vaccine hesita…
Mixing messages
How do candidates campaign on social media? To date, political scientists have mostly considered the content or tone of candidates’ social media posts. In this paper, we combine these research areas and study how candidates’ campaigns vary the content and tone of their messages. We argue incumbents emphasize positive issue content and limit attacking their opponent. Competitive races encourage positive mobilization posts and aggressive attack mes…
Norms and rage
Narrowing the Academic-Policy Divide
THERE IS ENDURING INTEREST IN making political science more relevant to policymakers and the public.1 Most political scientists seeking to bridge the academic-policymaker gap believe that the main obstacle they face is a failure of communication. According to this view, a significant amount of the research they conduct is potentially relevant to policymakers, but scholars struggle to engage key audiences. In other words, the problem is with the p…
Social Media as Social Science Data
Social media has put mass communication in the hands of normal people on an unprecedented scale, and has also given social scientists the tools necessary to listen to the voices of everyday people around the world. This book gives social scientists the skills necessary to leverage that opportunity, and transform social media's vast stream of information into social science data. The book combines the big data techniques of computer science with s…
Measuring Congressional Partisanship and Its Consequences
We develop a method for measuring a legislator’s partisanship using their Twitter rhetoric. To do so, we classify over 2.1 million tweets sent during two congressional terms (2015 through 2018) to determine how often members use explicitly partisan language. Since lawmakers are strategic in how they communicate with the public, we argue our approach captures a member’s partisan intensity, the time and effort they devote to supporting their party.…
Measuring online political activity
Political engagement is deeply enmeshed with online activity. However, there has been a lack of publicly available cross-country datasets enabling researchers and policymakers to understand how politics and digital space intersect. This paper introduces the Digital Society Project (DSP), which aims to provide systematic, cross-country measurement of political institutions and behavior that manifest online or are affected by online activity. Using…
The Political Twittersphere as a Breeding Ground for Populist Ideas
This study employs a neural network approach to investigate the dissemination and content of populist ideas within the Israeli political Twittersphere. By analyzing a data set of Twitter activity by Israeli lawmakers from 2013 to 2022, the study reveals a consistent increase in the frequency and concentration of populist ideas, particularly among legislators from religious-nationalist parties. The analysis of the topical content of populist ideas…
Experts, coders and crowds
Political scientists increasingly use crowdworkers to produce data, predominantly in the context of coding researcher-curated text or to retrieve simple data from the internet. In this article, we provide a theoretical and empirical basis for understanding when crowdworkers can provide data of sufficient quality to substitute for other types of coders. First, we introduce a typology of data-producing actors – experts, trained coders and crowds – …
“We are 97%”
This article analyzes the network structure and content of local Telegram chats in Belarus using the theoretical framework of connective action logic. Using the data collected right at the aftermath of the protests, we created a bimodal network consisting of almost 800 local chats and over 440,000 unique users. This “network of networks” featured subnetworks within the country’s regions, towns, and city districts, as well as Belarusian diaspora, …
Populists in power
This study examines the inclusion-moderation thesis within the context of Israeli populism, focusing on how government participation influences the communication styles of populist legislators. By analyzing a comprehensive dataset of tweets from Israeli lawmakers between 2015 and 2022, we explore whether holding office leads to a moderation of populist rhetoric. Our findings indicate that while coalition members generally exhibit reduced populist…
Political science (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Social Media and Politics (8 works) · Economics (5 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Political economy (5 works)