Pablo Barberá Aresté
Biographic Data
| ID | 291216 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pablo Barberá Aresté |
| GIVEN NAMES | Pablo Barberá |
| FAMILY NAME | Aresté |
| SIGNATURE | ARESTÉ P B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9063-4829 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1205 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Does Listening to Trustworthy News Affect Political Attitudes and Trust?
Measuring and Understanding Parties’ Anti-elite Strategies
When Does Fame Not Matter? Examining Gender Differences in Politicians’ Social Media Experiences
Past research alerts to the increasingly unpleasant climate surrounding public debate on social media. Female politicians, in particular, are reporting serious attacks targeted at them. Yet, research offers inconclusive insights regarding the gender gap in online incivility. This paper aims to address this gap by comparing politicians with varying levels of prominence and public status in different institutional contexts. Using a machine learning…
The Diffusion and Reach of (Mis)Information on Facebook during the U.S. 2020 Election
Social media creates the possibility for rapid, viral spread of content, but how many posts actually reach millions? And is misinformation special in how it propagates? We answer these questions by analyzing the virality of and exposure to information on Facebook during the U.S. 2020 presidential election. We examine the diffusion trees of the approximately 1 B posts that were re-shared at least once by U.S.-based adults from July 1, 2020, to Feb…
Trumping Hate on Twitter? Online Hate Speech in the 2016 U.S. Election Campaign and its Aftermath
Who's cheating on your survey? A detection approach with digital trace data
In this note, we provide direct evidence of cheating in online assessments of political knowledge. We combine survey responses with web tracking data of a German and a US online panel to assess whether people turn to external sources for answers. We observe item-level prevalence rates of cheating that range from 0 to 12 percent depending on question type and difficulty, and find that 23 percent of respondents engage in cheating at least once acro…
Votando a partidos o a candidatos? El trade-off entre representación de partido y personal en las elecciones autonómicas y locales en España
Cuando los electores emiten su voto, ¿están eligiendoun candidato o un partido? Los sistemas electoralesejercen un impacto significativo en cómo estacuestión es resuelta en cada país. Tal y como estudiosanteriores han demostrado, algunos de ellos fomentanuna representación más personal, mientrasque otros contribuyen a reforzar el papel intermediadorde los partidos. En este artículo defiendo queexiste un trade-off entre estos dos tipos de represen…
Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing
Many critics raise concerns about the prevalence of ‘echo chambers’ on social media and their potential role in increasing political polarization. However, the lack of available data and the challenges of conducting large-scale field experiments have made it difficult to assess the scope of the problem 1,2 . Here we present data from 2020 for the entire population of active adult Facebook users in the USA showing that content from ‘like-minded’ s…
Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook
Does Facebook enable ideological segregation in political news consumption? We analyzed exposure to news during the US 2020 election using aggregated data for 208 million US Facebook users. We compared the inventory of all political news that users could have seen in their feeds with the information that they saw (after algorithmic curation) and the information with which they engaged. We show that (i) ideological segregation is high and increase…
How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?
We investigated the effects of Facebook’s and Instagram’s feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the default algorithms. Moving users out of algorithmic feeds substantially decreased the time they spent on the platforms and their activity. The chronological feed also affected exposure to content: The amount of political and untrustworthy content the…
Social capital II: Determinants of economic connectedness
Low levels of social interaction across class lines have generated widespread concern 1–4 and are associated with worse outcomes, such as lower rates of upward income mobility 4–7 . Here we analyse the determinants of cross-class interaction using data from Facebook, building on the analysis in our companion paper 7 . We show that about half of the social disconnection across socioeconomic lines—measured as the difference in the share of high-soc…
Distract and Divert: How World Leaders Use Social Media During Contentious Politics
How do leaders communicate during domestic crises? We provide the first global analysis of world leader communication on social media during social unrest. We develop a theory of leaders’ digital communication strategies, building on the diversionary theory of foreign policy, as well as research on the role of democratic institutions in explaining elite responsiveness. To test our theory, we construct a new dataset that characterizes leader commu…
The consequences of online partisan media
Significance Popular wisdom suggests that the internet plays a major role in influencing people’s attitudes and behaviors related to politics, such as by providing slanted sources of information. Yet evidence for this proposition is elusive due to methodological difficulties and the multifaceted nature of online media effects. This study breaks ground by demonstrating a nudge-like approach for exploring these effects through a combination of real…
Trumping Hate on Twitter? Online Hate Speech in the 2016 U.S. Election Campaign and its Aftermath
To what extent did online hate speech and white nationalist rhetoric on Twitter increase over the course of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign and its immediate aftermath? The prevailing narrative suggests that Trump’s political rise — and his unexpected victory — lent legitimacy to and popularized bigoted rhetoric that was once relegated to the dark corners of the Internet. However, our analysis of over 750 million tweets related…
Do Online Voter Guides Empower Citizens
Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), which provide citizens with information on the party that best represents their political preferences, are often cited as evidence of the empowering capabilities of digital tools. Aside from the informational benefits of these voter guides, observational studies have suggested a strong effect on political participation and vote choice. However, existing impact evaluations have been limited by a reliance on conve…
Automated Text Classification of News Articles: A Practical Guide
Automated text analysis methods have made possible the classification of large corpora of text by measures such as topic and tone. Here, we provide a guide to help researchers navigate the consequential decisions they need to make before any measure can be produced from the text. We consider, both theoretically and empirically, the effects of such choices using as a running example efforts to measure the tone ofNew York Timescoverage of the econo…
Elite‐public interaction on twitter: EU issue expansion in the campaign
Why do some issues receive more interest from the public, while others do not? This paper develops a theoretical and empirical approach that explains the degree to which issues expand from the elite to the public. We examine how candidates in the 2014 European Parliament elections talked about EU issues, in comparison to other political issues. We rely on data collected from Twitter and use a combination of human coding and machine learning to an…
Social Media, Echo Chambers, and Political Polarization
The aim of this chapter is to offer an exhaustive review of the literature exploring the link between social media and political polarization. It highlights the areas where a consensus based on empirical evidence has already emerged but also identifies the questions that remain open and the type of data and analysis that would help address them.
The Dynamics of Political Incivility on Twitter
Online incivility and harassment in political communication have become an important topic of concern among politicians, journalists, and academics. This study provides a descriptive account of uncivil interactions between citizens and politicians on Twitter. We develop a conceptual framework for understanding the dynamics of incivility at three distinct levels: macro (temporal), meso (contextual), and micro (individual). Using longitudinal data …
Who Leads? Who Follows? Measuring Issue Attention and Agenda Setting by Legislators and the Mass Public Using Social Media Data
Are legislators responsive to the priorities of the public? Research demonstrates a strong correspondence between the issues about which the public cares and the issues addressed by politicians, but conclusive evidence about who leads whom in setting the political agenda has yet to be uncovered. We answer this question with fine-grained temporal analyses of Twitter messages by legislators and the public during the 113th US Congress. After employi…
How Social Media Facilitates Political Protest: Information, Motivation, and Social Networks
It is often claimed that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are profoundly shaping political participation, especially when it comes to protest behavior. Whether or not this is the case, the analysis of “Big Data” generated by social media usage offers unprecedented opportunities to observe complex, dynamic effects associated with large‐scale collective action and social movements. In this article, we summarize evidence from stud…
The New Public Address System: Why Do World Leaders Adopt Social Media
The growth of social media—and, in particular, Twitter and Facebook—has led scholars to study its effects on mass behavior and protest. But leaders are also active on social media. They use their accounts to communicate with domestic and international audiences. By the end of 2014, more than 76 percent of world leaders had an active presence on social media. What explains variation in their adoption and use of social media? We look at several dif…
Elecciones municipales en España. La personalización del voto
Cuando los ciudadanos votan en elecciones municipales, ¿tienen en cuenta solo factores a nivel nacional? O, por el contrario, ¿prestan también atención a elementos de carácter local? En este artículo sostenemos que la evaluación que hacen los ciudadanos de los candidatos a la alcaldía es un factor particularmente importante para explicar el sentido del voto en las elecciones locales en España. Para verificar empíricamente la existencia de esta re…
Measuring Public Opinion with Social Media Data
This chapter examines the use of social networking sites such as Twitter in measuring public opinion. It first considers the opportunities and challenges that are involved in conducting public opinion surveys using social media data. Three challenges are discussed: identifying political opinion, representativeness of social media users, and aggregating from individual responses to public opinion. The chapter outlines some of the strategies for ov…
Is the Left-Right Scale a Valid Measure of Ideology: Individual-Level Variation in Associations with “Left” and “Right” and Left-Right Self-Placement
Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data
Politicians and citizens increasingly engage in political conversations on social media outlets such as Twitter. In this article, I show that the structure of the social networks in which they are embedded can be a source of information about their ideological positions. Under the assumption that social networks are homophilic, I develop a Bayesian Spatial Following model that considers ideology as a latent variable, whose value can be inferred b…
Who Leads? Who Follows? Measuring Issue Attention and Agenda Setting by Legislators and the Mass Public Using Social Media Data
Are legislators responsive to the priorities of the public? Research demonstrates a strong correspondence between the issues about which the public cares and the issues addressed by politicians, but conclusive evidence about who leads whom in setting the political agenda has yet to be uncovered. We answer this question with fine-grained temporal analyses of Twitter messages by legislators and the public during the 113th US Congress. After employi…
Is the Left-Right Scale a Valid Measure of Ideology: Individual-Level Variation in Associations with “Left” and “Right” and Left-Right Self-Placement
From Liberation to Turmoil: Social Media And Democracy
How can one technology—social media—simultaneously give rise to hopes for liberation in authoritarian regimes, be used for repression by these same regimes, and be harnessed by antisystem actors in democracy? We present a simple framework for reconciling these contradictory developments based on two propositions: 1) that social media give voice to those previously excluded from political discussion by traditional media, and 2) that although socia…
How Social Media Facilitates Political Protest: Information, Motivation, and Social Networks
It is often claimed that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are profoundly shaping political participation, especially when it comes to protest behavior. Whether or not this is the case, the analysis of “Big Data” generated by social media usage offers unprecedented opportunities to observe complex, dynamic effects associated with large‐scale collective action and social movements. In this article, we summarize evidence from stud…
Rooting Out Corruption or Rooting for Corruption? The Heterogeneous Electoral Consequences of Scandals
Corruption scandals have been found to have significant but mild electoral effects in the comparative literature (Golden 2006). However, most studies have assumed that voters punish all kinds of illegal practices. This article challenges this assumption by distinguishing between two types of corruption, according to the type of welfare consequences they have for the constituency. This hypothesis is tested using data from the 2011 Spanish local el…
Understanding the Political Representativeness of Twitter Users
In this article, we analyze the structure and content of the political conversations that took place through the microblogging platform Twitter in the context of the 2011 Spanish legislative elections and the 2012 U.S. presidential elections. Using a unique database of nearly 70 million tweets collected during both election campaigns, we find that Twitter replicates most of the existing inequalities in public political exchanges. Twitter users wh…
Political Expression and Action on Social Media: Exploring the Relationship Between Lower- and Higher-Threshold Political Activities Among Twitter Users in Italy
Scholars and commentators have debated whether lower-threshold forms of political engagement on social media should be treated as being conducive to higher-threshold modes of political participation or a diversion from them. Drawing on an original survey of a representative sample of Italians who discussed the 2013 election on Twitter, we demonstrate that the more respondents acquire political information via social media and express themselves p…
Automated Text Classification of News Articles: A Practical Guide
Automated text analysis methods have made possible the classification of large corpora of text by measures such as topic and tone. Here, we provide a guide to help researchers navigate the consequential decisions they need to make before any measure can be produced from the text. We consider, both theoretically and empirically, the effects of such choices using as a running example efforts to measure the tone ofNew York Timescoverage of the econo…
Elite‐public interaction on twitter: EU issue expansion in the campaign
Why do some issues receive more interest from the public, while others do not? This paper develops a theoretical and empirical approach that explains the degree to which issues expand from the elite to the public. We examine how candidates in the 2014 European Parliament elections talked about EU issues, in comparison to other political issues. We rely on data collected from Twitter and use a combination of human coding and machine learning to an…
The New Public Address System: Why Do World Leaders Adopt Social Media
The growth of social media—and, in particular, Twitter and Facebook—has led scholars to study its effects on mass behavior and protest. But leaders are also active on social media. They use their accounts to communicate with domestic and international audiences. By the end of 2014, more than 76 percent of world leaders had an active presence on social media. What explains variation in their adoption and use of social media? We look at several dif…
The Dynamics of Political Incivility on Twitter
Online incivility and harassment in political communication have become an important topic of concern among politicians, journalists, and academics. This study provides a descriptive account of uncivil interactions between citizens and politicians on Twitter. We develop a conceptual framework for understanding the dynamics of incivility at three distinct levels: macro (temporal), meso (contextual), and micro (individual). Using longitudinal data …
Do Online Voter Guides Empower Citizens
Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), which provide citizens with information on the party that best represents their political preferences, are often cited as evidence of the empowering capabilities of digital tools. Aside from the informational benefits of these voter guides, observational studies have suggested a strong effect on political participation and vote choice. However, existing impact evaluations have been limited by a reliance on conve…
Of Echo Chambers and Contrarian Clubs: Exposure to Political Disagreement Among German and Italian Users of Twitter
Scholars have debated whether social media platforms, by allowing users to select the information to which they are exposed, may lead people to isolate themselves from viewpoints with which they disagree, thereby serving as political 'echo chambers.' We investigate hypotheses concerning the circumstances under which Twitter users who communicate about elections would engage with (a) supportive, (b) oppositional, and (c) mixed political networks. …
Measuring and Understanding Parties’ Anti-elite Strategies
Trumping Hate on Twitter? Online Hate Speech in the 2016 U.S. Election Campaign and its Aftermath
To what extent did online hate speech and white nationalist rhetoric on Twitter increase over the course of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign and its immediate aftermath? The prevailing narrative suggests that Trump’s political rise — and his unexpected victory — lent legitimacy to and popularized bigoted rhetoric that was once relegated to the dark corners of the Internet. However, our analysis of over 750 million tweets related…
Measuring Public Opinion with Social Media Data
This chapter examines the use of social networking sites such as Twitter in measuring public opinion. It first considers the opportunities and challenges that are involved in conducting public opinion surveys using social media data. Three challenges are discussed: identifying political opinion, representativeness of social media users, and aggregating from individual responses to public opinion. The chapter outlines some of the strategies for ov…
Elecciones municipales en España: Un Análisis Multinivel De Los Determinantes Individuales Y Contextuales Del Voto
Desde la instauración de los primeros ayuntamientos democráticos en 1979, se han celebrado diez elecciones municipales en España. En los escasos estudios dedicados a ellas, el voto ha sido habitualmente explicado recurriendo a variables de ámbito nacional según el conocido modelo de las elecciones de segundo orden. En este trabajo examinaremos la validez de estos patrones de comportamiento cuando introducimos también factores explicativos de cará…
Who's cheating on your survey? A detection approach with digital trace data
In this note, we provide direct evidence of cheating in online assessments of political knowledge. We combine survey responses with web tracking data of a German and a US online panel to assess whether people turn to external sources for answers. We observe item-level prevalence rates of cheating that range from 0 to 12 percent depending on question type and difficulty, and find that 23 percent of respondents engage in cheating at least once acro…
Elecciones municipales en España. La personalización del voto
Cuando los ciudadanos votan en elecciones municipales, ¿tienen en cuenta solo factores a nivel nacional? O, por el contrario, ¿prestan también atención a elementos de carácter local? En este artículo sostenemos que la evaluación que hacen los ciudadanos de los candidatos a la alcaldía es un factor particularmente importante para explicar el sentido del voto en las elecciones locales en España. Para verificar empíricamente la existencia de esta re…
Distract and Divert: How World Leaders Use Social Media During Contentious Politics
How do leaders communicate during domestic crises? We provide the first global analysis of world leader communication on social media during social unrest. We develop a theory of leaders’ digital communication strategies, building on the diversionary theory of foreign policy, as well as research on the role of democratic institutions in explaining elite responsiveness. To test our theory, we construct a new dataset that characterizes leader commu…
When Does Fame Not Matter? Examining Gender Differences in Politicians’ Social Media Experiences
Past research alerts to the increasingly unpleasant climate surrounding public debate on social media. Female politicians, in particular, are reporting serious attacks targeted at them. Yet, research offers inconclusive insights regarding the gender gap in online incivility. This paper aims to address this gap by comparing politicians with varying levels of prominence and public status in different institutional contexts. Using a machine learning…
Understanding the Political Representativeness of Twitter Users
In this article, we analyze the structure and content of the political conversations that took place through the microblogging platform Twitter in the context of the 2011 Spanish legislative elections and the 2012 U.S. presidential elections. Using a unique database of nearly 70 million tweets collected during both election campaigns, we find that Twitter replicates most of the existing inequalities in public political exchanges. Twitter users wh…
Tweeting From Left to Right: Is Online Political Communication More Than an Echo Chamber?
We estimated ideological preferences of 3.8 million Twitter users and, using a data set of nearly 150 million tweets concerning 12 political and nonpolitical issues, explored whether online communication resembles an “echo chamber” (as a result of selective exposure and ideological segregation) or a “national conversation.” We observed that information was exchanged primarily among individuals with similar ideological preferences in the case of p…
Political Expression and Action on Social Media: Exploring the Relationship Between Lower- and Higher-Threshold Political Activities Among Twitter Users in Italy
Scholars and commentators have debated whether lower-threshold forms of political engagement on social media should be treated as being conducive to higher-threshold modes of political participation or a diversion from them. Drawing on an original survey of a representative sample of Italians who discussed the 2013 election on Twitter, we demonstrate that the more respondents acquire political information via social media and express themselves p…
Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data
Politicians and citizens increasingly engage in political conversations on social media outlets such as Twitter. In this article, I show that the structure of the social networks in which they are embedded can be a source of information about their ideological positions. Under the assumption that social networks are homophilic, I develop a Bayesian Spatial Following model that considers ideology as a latent variable, whose value can be inferred b…
A Bad Workman Blames His Tweets: The Consequences of Citizens' Uncivil Twitter Use When Interacting With Party Candidates
Existing studies focusing on politicians' adoption of Twitter have found that they use it primarily as a broadcasting tool. We argue that citizens' impolite and/or uncivil behavior is one possible explanation for such decisions. Social media conversations are rife with harassment and politicians are a prime target. This alters the incentive structure of engaging in dialogue on social media. We use Spanish, Greek, German, and U.K. candidates' twee…
Elecciones municipales en España: Un Análisis Multinivel De Los Determinantes Individuales Y Contextuales Del Voto
Desde la instauración de los primeros ayuntamientos democráticos en 1979, se han celebrado diez elecciones municipales en España. En los escasos estudios dedicados a ellas, el voto ha sido habitualmente explicado recurriendo a variables de ámbito nacional según el conocido modelo de las elecciones de segundo orden. En este trabajo examinaremos la validez de estos patrones de comportamiento cuando introducimos también factores explicativos de cará…
Rooting Out Corruption or Rooting for Corruption? The Heterogeneous Electoral Consequences of Scandals
Corruption scandals have been found to have significant but mild electoral effects in the comparative literature (Golden 2006). However, most studies have assumed that voters punish all kinds of illegal practices. This article challenges this assumption by distinguishing between two types of corruption, according to the type of welfare consequences they have for the constituency. This hypothesis is tested using data from the 2011 Spanish local el…
Of Echo Chambers and Contrarian Clubs: Exposure to Political Disagreement Among German and Italian Users of Twitter
Scholars have debated whether social media platforms, by allowing users to select the information to which they are exposed, may lead people to isolate themselves from viewpoints with which they disagree, thereby serving as political 'echo chambers.' We investigate hypotheses concerning the circumstances under which Twitter users who communicate about elections would engage with (a) supportive, (b) oppositional, and (c) mixed political networks. …
Elecciones municipales en España. La personalización del voto
Cuando los ciudadanos votan en elecciones municipales, ¿tienen en cuenta solo factores a nivel nacional? O, por el contrario, ¿prestan también atención a elementos de carácter local? En este artículo sostenemos que la evaluación que hacen los ciudadanos de los candidatos a la alcaldía es un factor particularmente importante para explicar el sentido del voto en las elecciones locales en España. Para verificar empíricamente la existencia de esta re…
Measuring Public Opinion with Social Media Data
This chapter examines the use of social networking sites such as Twitter in measuring public opinion. It first considers the opportunities and challenges that are involved in conducting public opinion surveys using social media data. Three challenges are discussed: identifying political opinion, representativeness of social media users, and aggregating from individual responses to public opinion. The chapter outlines some of the strategies for ov…
Is the Left-Right Scale a Valid Measure of Ideology: Individual-Level Variation in Associations with “Left” and “Right” and Left-Right Self-Placement
From Liberation to Turmoil: Social Media And Democracy
How can one technology—social media—simultaneously give rise to hopes for liberation in authoritarian regimes, be used for repression by these same regimes, and be harnessed by antisystem actors in democracy? We present a simple framework for reconciling these contradictory developments based on two propositions: 1) that social media give voice to those previously excluded from political discussion by traditional media, and 2) that although socia…
How Social Media Facilitates Political Protest: Information, Motivation, and Social Networks
It is often claimed that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are profoundly shaping political participation, especially when it comes to protest behavior. Whether or not this is the case, the analysis of “Big Data” generated by social media usage offers unprecedented opportunities to observe complex, dynamic effects associated with large‐scale collective action and social movements. In this article, we summarize evidence from stud…
The New Public Address System: Why Do World Leaders Adopt Social Media
The growth of social media—and, in particular, Twitter and Facebook—has led scholars to study its effects on mass behavior and protest. But leaders are also active on social media. They use their accounts to communicate with domestic and international audiences. By the end of 2014, more than 76 percent of world leaders had an active presence on social media. What explains variation in their adoption and use of social media? We look at several dif…
Who Leads? Who Follows? Measuring Issue Attention and Agenda Setting by Legislators and the Mass Public Using Social Media Data
Are legislators responsive to the priorities of the public? Research demonstrates a strong correspondence between the issues about which the public cares and the issues addressed by politicians, but conclusive evidence about who leads whom in setting the political agenda has yet to be uncovered. We answer this question with fine-grained temporal analyses of Twitter messages by legislators and the public during the 113th US Congress. After employi…
Social Media, Echo Chambers, and Political Polarization
The aim of this chapter is to offer an exhaustive review of the literature exploring the link between social media and political polarization. It highlights the areas where a consensus based on empirical evidence has already emerged but also identifies the questions that remain open and the type of data and analysis that would help address them.
The Dynamics of Political Incivility on Twitter
Online incivility and harassment in political communication have become an important topic of concern among politicians, journalists, and academics. This study provides a descriptive account of uncivil interactions between citizens and politicians on Twitter. We develop a conceptual framework for understanding the dynamics of incivility at three distinct levels: macro (temporal), meso (contextual), and micro (individual). Using longitudinal data …
The consequences of online partisan media
Significance Popular wisdom suggests that the internet plays a major role in influencing people’s attitudes and behaviors related to politics, such as by providing slanted sources of information. Yet evidence for this proposition is elusive due to methodological difficulties and the multifaceted nature of online media effects. This study breaks ground by demonstrating a nudge-like approach for exploring these effects through a combination of real…
Trumping Hate on Twitter? Online Hate Speech in the 2016 U.S. Election Campaign and its Aftermath
To what extent did online hate speech and white nationalist rhetoric on Twitter increase over the course of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign and its immediate aftermath? The prevailing narrative suggests that Trump’s political rise — and his unexpected victory — lent legitimacy to and popularized bigoted rhetoric that was once relegated to the dark corners of the Internet. However, our analysis of over 750 million tweets related…
Do Online Voter Guides Empower Citizens
Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), which provide citizens with information on the party that best represents their political preferences, are often cited as evidence of the empowering capabilities of digital tools. Aside from the informational benefits of these voter guides, observational studies have suggested a strong effect on political participation and vote choice. However, existing impact evaluations have been limited by a reliance on conve…
Automated Text Classification of News Articles: A Practical Guide
Automated text analysis methods have made possible the classification of large corpora of text by measures such as topic and tone. Here, we provide a guide to help researchers navigate the consequential decisions they need to make before any measure can be produced from the text. We consider, both theoretically and empirically, the effects of such choices using as a running example efforts to measure the tone ofNew York Timescoverage of the econo…
Elite‐public interaction on twitter: EU issue expansion in the campaign
Why do some issues receive more interest from the public, while others do not? This paper develops a theoretical and empirical approach that explains the degree to which issues expand from the elite to the public. We examine how candidates in the 2014 European Parliament elections talked about EU issues, in comparison to other political issues. We rely on data collected from Twitter and use a combination of human coding and machine learning to an…
Social capital II: Determinants of economic connectedness
Low levels of social interaction across class lines have generated widespread concern 1–4 and are associated with worse outcomes, such as lower rates of upward income mobility 4–7 . Here we analyse the determinants of cross-class interaction using data from Facebook, building on the analysis in our companion paper 7 . We show that about half of the social disconnection across socioeconomic lines—measured as the difference in the share of high-soc…
Distract and Divert: How World Leaders Use Social Media During Contentious Politics
How do leaders communicate during domestic crises? We provide the first global analysis of world leader communication on social media during social unrest. We develop a theory of leaders’ digital communication strategies, building on the diversionary theory of foreign policy, as well as research on the role of democratic institutions in explaining elite responsiveness. To test our theory, we construct a new dataset that characterizes leader commu…
Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing
Many critics raise concerns about the prevalence of ‘echo chambers’ on social media and their potential role in increasing political polarization. However, the lack of available data and the challenges of conducting large-scale field experiments have made it difficult to assess the scope of the problem 1,2 . Here we present data from 2020 for the entire population of active adult Facebook users in the USA showing that content from ‘like-minded’ s…
Political science (32 works) · Politics (24 works) · Social Media and Politics (22 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Law (18 works) · Social media (17 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (15 works) · Public relations (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works)