Sebastián Vallejo Vera
Biographic Data
| ID | 781966 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sebastián Vallejo Vera |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sebastián Vallejo |
| FAMILY NAME | Vera |
| SIGNATURE | VERA S V |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tecnológico de Monterrey |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5848-7400 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 72 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Impact of Journalistic Cultures on Social Media Discourse: US Primary Debates in Cross-Lingual Online Spaces
This cross-lingual project examines how social media posts of Spanish- and English-language media impact incivility in user comments during the 2020 primary political debates in the United States. We analyzed Facebook posts of news organizations that hosted the debates and used a state-of-the-art machine-learning model to analyze the corresponding comments. Our findings reveal distinct journalistic cultures on the post-level: English-language med…
Rolling Memory: A New Approach to Annotation with Generative LLMs in Social and Political Research
Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in text annotation tasks, which is of interest to social scientists. The most commonly used approaches, zero-shot and few-shot learning, do not sufficiently exploit the in-context learning capabilities of these models. Extant work demonstrates that allowing these models to retain memory throughout the annotation task increases performance considerably. In this article, we propos…
Machines Do See Color: Using LLMs to Classify Overt and Covert Racism in Text
Extant work has identified two discursive forms of racism: overt and covert. While both forms have received attention in scholarly work, research on covert racism has been limited. Its subtle and context-specific nature has made it difficult to systematically identify covert racism in text, especially in large corpora. In this article, we first propose a theoretically driven and generalizable process to identify and classify covert and overt raci…
LLMs as annotators: The effect of party cues on labelling decisions by large language models
Human coders can be biased. We test whether Large Language Models (LLMs) replicate those biases when used as text annotators. By replicating an experiment conducted by Ennser-Jedenastik and Meyer ( 2018 ), we find evidence that LLMs use political information, and specifically party cues, to evaluate political statements. Not only do LLMs use relevant information to contextualize whether a statement is positive, negative, or neutral based on the p…
Bert, RoBerta, or DeBerta? Comparing Performance Across Transformers Models in Political Science Text
Gender, Institutions, and Legislative Speech
Speechmaking is a vital resource for legislators and holds particular importance for women lawmakers, who frequently constitute a numerical minority and face constraints on their political influence. We argue that formal and informal institutions, district characteristics, and issue priorities shape women's speech participation. Analyzing twenty-eight years of speeches from Chile's Chamber of Deputies, we first show that women's speeches constitu…
The Democratic Value of Strategic Game Reporting and Uncivil Talk: A Computational Analysis of Facebook Conversations During U.S. Primary Debates
This study explores discourse features on Facebook pages of news organizations during the 2020 U.S. primary debates using a state-of-the-art machine-learning model. Informing the scholarly debate about the implications of strategic game reporting in online spaces, we find that it is not necessarily linked to uncivil discourse, yet it might deter from relevant conversations. Second, addressing fears about the undesired outcomes of uncivil talk, ou…
Speech targeting and constituency representation in open-list electoral systems
Congressional Committees, Electoral Connections, and Legislative Speech
This article examines the effects of committee specialization and district characteristics on speech participation by topic and congressional forum. It argues that committee specialization should increase speech participation during legislative debates, while district characteristics should affect the likelihood of speech participation in non-lawmaking forums. To examine these expectations, we analyze over 100,000 speeches delivered in the Chilea…
By invitation only: On Why Do Politicians Bring Interest Groups Into Committees
In democratic politics, the participation of interest groups in policymaking is commonly understood as a secluded affair. Why would interest groups and policymakers make public an otherwise private affair? I argue that legislators invite interest groups to participate in the legislative process to raise the salience of issues they "own". Legislators with gatekeeping authority, I show, bring interest groups into committees when their party benefit…
How do shocks realign interest group lobbying in congress? Evidence from ecuador
How does the coordination strategy of interest groups change during a crisis? Shocks reduce an economy's resource pool and increase the competition for what is available. Interest groups participate in the policy-making process by lobbying legislators. In times of crisis, we argue, interest groups lobbying Congress coordinate in cohesive industry-wide communities led by key actors. Rather than lobbying for narrow policy privileges, interest group…
Rage in the Machine: Activation of Racist Content in Social Media
Racism in social media is ubiquitous, persisting online in ways unique to the internet while also reverberating from the world offline. When will racist frames activate in social media networks? This article argues that social media users engage with racist content when they perceive a threat to the in-group status, selecting frames that serve as markers to separate the in-group identity from the out-group identity. Racialized frames serve as the…
The Politics of Interruptions: Gendered Disruptions of Legislative Speeches
Floor time in legislatures is a valuable commodity that legislators use to gain political capital and electoral benefits. There are well-known political and institutional barriers to participation, but these do not explain gender differences in access to floor time. In this article, we look at the role interruptions play as potential barriers to floor time. We explore how women strategically react to these barriers and consider how these reaction…
An Unwelcomed Deja-vu: Ecuadorian Politics in 2021
Este trabajo explica la configuración del escenario político en Ecuador tras las elecciones\ngenerales de 2021. Las consecuencias sociales y económicas del primer año de pandemia\nrepresentaron un importante desafío para el nuevo gobierno. Guillermo Lasso ganó las\nelecciones con el apoyo del anticorreísmo, pero este apoyo no se trasladó a la arena legislativa. Lasso asumió los desafíos de política pública recurriendo a estrategias ampliamente\nu…
Believe in me: Parties’ Strategies During a Pandemic, Evidence from Ecuador
There is a growing interest to evaluate the political aftermath of the pandemic. We study how parties attract voters under the redistributive pressure created by COVID-19, looking into the 2021 Ecuadorian elections. We classify the messages that candidates sent, evaluate if and how candidates used COVID-19 to mobilize voters, and assess how voters reacted to them. We followed 858 virtual events and gathered more than 1’575.000 tweets from candida…
Talking the Talk but Not Walking the Walk: Public Reactions to Hypocrisy in Political Scandal
Aggregate, survey, and experimental research into political scandal teaches us how the public reacts to revelations of misdeeds on behalf of its elected representatives. One common scenario, however, has been largely overlooked in scandal studies: the effects of hypocrisy in scandal. Examples abound of politicians who campaign on values that they then directly betray with their actions in office. Conventional wisdom, however, holds that such hypo…
The Politics of Interruptions: Gendered Disruptions of Legislative Speeches
Floor time in legislatures is a valuable commodity that legislators use to gain political capital and electoral benefits. There are well-known political and institutional barriers to participation, but these do not explain gender differences in access to floor time. In this article, we look at the role interruptions play as potential barriers to floor time. We explore how women strategically react to these barriers and consider how these reaction…
Talking the Talk but Not Walking the Walk: Public Reactions to Hypocrisy in Political Scandal
Aggregate, survey, and experimental research into political scandal teaches us how the public reacts to revelations of misdeeds on behalf of its elected representatives. One common scenario, however, has been largely overlooked in scandal studies: the effects of hypocrisy in scandal. Examples abound of politicians who campaign on values that they then directly betray with their actions in office. Conventional wisdom, however, holds that such hypo…
Bert, RoBerta, or DeBerta? Comparing Performance Across Transformers Models in Political Science Text
By invitation only: On Why Do Politicians Bring Interest Groups Into Committees
In democratic politics, the participation of interest groups in policymaking is commonly understood as a secluded affair. Why would interest groups and policymakers make public an otherwise private affair? I argue that legislators invite interest groups to participate in the legislative process to raise the salience of issues they "own". Legislators with gatekeeping authority, I show, bring interest groups into committees when their party benefit…
An Unwelcomed Deja-vu: Ecuadorian Politics in 2021
Este trabajo explica la configuración del escenario político en Ecuador tras las elecciones\ngenerales de 2021. Las consecuencias sociales y económicas del primer año de pandemia\nrepresentaron un importante desafío para el nuevo gobierno. Guillermo Lasso ganó las\nelecciones con el apoyo del anticorreísmo, pero este apoyo no se trasladó a la arena legislativa. Lasso asumió los desafíos de política pública recurriendo a estrategias ampliamente\nu…
Congressional Committees, Electoral Connections, and Legislative Speech
This article examines the effects of committee specialization and district characteristics on speech participation by topic and congressional forum. It argues that committee specialization should increase speech participation during legislative debates, while district characteristics should affect the likelihood of speech participation in non-lawmaking forums. To examine these expectations, we analyze over 100,000 speeches delivered in the Chilea…
Rolling Memory: A New Approach to Annotation with Generative LLMs in Social and Political Research
Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in text annotation tasks, which is of interest to social scientists. The most commonly used approaches, zero-shot and few-shot learning, do not sufficiently exploit the in-context learning capabilities of these models. Extant work demonstrates that allowing these models to retain memory throughout the annotation task increases performance considerably. In this article, we propos…
Gender, Institutions, and Legislative Speech
Speechmaking is a vital resource for legislators and holds particular importance for women lawmakers, who frequently constitute a numerical minority and face constraints on their political influence. We argue that formal and informal institutions, district characteristics, and issue priorities shape women's speech participation. Analyzing twenty-eight years of speeches from Chile's Chamber of Deputies, we first show that women's speeches constitu…
Believe in me: Parties’ Strategies During a Pandemic, Evidence from Ecuador
There is a growing interest to evaluate the political aftermath of the pandemic. We study how parties attract voters under the redistributive pressure created by COVID-19, looking into the 2021 Ecuadorian elections. We classify the messages that candidates sent, evaluate if and how candidates used COVID-19 to mobilize voters, and assess how voters reacted to them. We followed 858 virtual events and gathered more than 1’575.000 tweets from candida…
Speech targeting and constituency representation in open-list electoral systems
How do shocks realign interest group lobbying in congress? Evidence from ecuador
How does the coordination strategy of interest groups change during a crisis? Shocks reduce an economy's resource pool and increase the competition for what is available. Interest groups participate in the policy-making process by lobbying legislators. In times of crisis, we argue, interest groups lobbying Congress coordinate in cohesive industry-wide communities led by key actors. Rather than lobbying for narrow policy privileges, interest group…
Rage in the Machine: Activation of Racist Content in Social Media
Racism in social media is ubiquitous, persisting online in ways unique to the internet while also reverberating from the world offline. When will racist frames activate in social media networks? This article argues that social media users engage with racist content when they perceive a threat to the in-group status, selecting frames that serve as markers to separate the in-group identity from the out-group identity. Racialized frames serve as the…
Talking the Talk but Not Walking the Walk: Public Reactions to Hypocrisy in Political Scandal
Aggregate, survey, and experimental research into political scandal teaches us how the public reacts to revelations of misdeeds on behalf of its elected representatives. One common scenario, however, has been largely overlooked in scandal studies: the effects of hypocrisy in scandal. Examples abound of politicians who campaign on values that they then directly betray with their actions in office. Conventional wisdom, however, holds that such hypo…
Believe in me: Parties’ Strategies During a Pandemic, Evidence from Ecuador
There is a growing interest to evaluate the political aftermath of the pandemic. We study how parties attract voters under the redistributive pressure created by COVID-19, looking into the 2021 Ecuadorian elections. We classify the messages that candidates sent, evaluate if and how candidates used COVID-19 to mobilize voters, and assess how voters reacted to them. We followed 858 virtual events and gathered more than 1’575.000 tweets from candida…
The Politics of Interruptions: Gendered Disruptions of Legislative Speeches
Floor time in legislatures is a valuable commodity that legislators use to gain political capital and electoral benefits. There are well-known political and institutional barriers to participation, but these do not explain gender differences in access to floor time. In this article, we look at the role interruptions play as potential barriers to floor time. We explore how women strategically react to these barriers and consider how these reaction…
An Unwelcomed Deja-vu: Ecuadorian Politics in 2021
Este trabajo explica la configuración del escenario político en Ecuador tras las elecciones\ngenerales de 2021. Las consecuencias sociales y económicas del primer año de pandemia\nrepresentaron un importante desafío para el nuevo gobierno. Guillermo Lasso ganó las\nelecciones con el apoyo del anticorreísmo, pero este apoyo no se trasladó a la arena legislativa. Lasso asumió los desafíos de política pública recurriendo a estrategias ampliamente\nu…
Congressional Committees, Electoral Connections, and Legislative Speech
This article examines the effects of committee specialization and district characteristics on speech participation by topic and congressional forum. It argues that committee specialization should increase speech participation during legislative debates, while district characteristics should affect the likelihood of speech participation in non-lawmaking forums. To examine these expectations, we analyze over 100,000 speeches delivered in the Chilea…
By invitation only: On Why Do Politicians Bring Interest Groups Into Committees
In democratic politics, the participation of interest groups in policymaking is commonly understood as a secluded affair. Why would interest groups and policymakers make public an otherwise private affair? I argue that legislators invite interest groups to participate in the legislative process to raise the salience of issues they "own". Legislators with gatekeeping authority, I show, bring interest groups into committees when their party benefit…
How do shocks realign interest group lobbying in congress? Evidence from ecuador
How does the coordination strategy of interest groups change during a crisis? Shocks reduce an economy's resource pool and increase the competition for what is available. Interest groups participate in the policy-making process by lobbying legislators. In times of crisis, we argue, interest groups lobbying Congress coordinate in cohesive industry-wide communities led by key actors. Rather than lobbying for narrow policy privileges, interest group…
Rage in the Machine: Activation of Racist Content in Social Media
Racism in social media is ubiquitous, persisting online in ways unique to the internet while also reverberating from the world offline. When will racist frames activate in social media networks? This article argues that social media users engage with racist content when they perceive a threat to the in-group status, selecting frames that serve as markers to separate the in-group identity from the out-group identity. Racialized frames serve as the…
The Democratic Value of Strategic Game Reporting and Uncivil Talk: A Computational Analysis of Facebook Conversations During U.S. Primary Debates
This study explores discourse features on Facebook pages of news organizations during the 2020 U.S. primary debates using a state-of-the-art machine-learning model. Informing the scholarly debate about the implications of strategic game reporting in online spaces, we find that it is not necessarily linked to uncivil discourse, yet it might deter from relevant conversations. Second, addressing fears about the undesired outcomes of uncivil talk, ou…
Speech targeting and constituency representation in open-list electoral systems
LLMs as annotators: The effect of party cues on labelling decisions by large language models
Human coders can be biased. We test whether Large Language Models (LLMs) replicate those biases when used as text annotators. By replicating an experiment conducted by Ennser-Jedenastik and Meyer ( 2018 ), we find evidence that LLMs use political information, and specifically party cues, to evaluate political statements. Not only do LLMs use relevant information to contextualize whether a statement is positive, negative, or neutral based on the p…
Bert, RoBerta, or DeBerta? Comparing Performance Across Transformers Models in Political Science Text
Gender, Institutions, and Legislative Speech
Speechmaking is a vital resource for legislators and holds particular importance for women lawmakers, who frequently constitute a numerical minority and face constraints on their political influence. We argue that formal and informal institutions, district characteristics, and issue priorities shape women's speech participation. Analyzing twenty-eight years of speeches from Chile's Chamber of Deputies, we first show that women's speeches constitu…
The Impact of Journalistic Cultures on Social Media Discourse: US Primary Debates in Cross-Lingual Online Spaces
This cross-lingual project examines how social media posts of Spanish- and English-language media impact incivility in user comments during the 2020 primary political debates in the United States. We analyzed Facebook posts of news organizations that hosted the debates and used a state-of-the-art machine-learning model to analyze the corresponding comments. Our findings reveal distinct journalistic cultures on the post-level: English-language med…
Rolling Memory: A New Approach to Annotation with Generative LLMs in Social and Political Research
Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in text annotation tasks, which is of interest to social scientists. The most commonly used approaches, zero-shot and few-shot learning, do not sufficiently exploit the in-context learning capabilities of these models. Extant work demonstrates that allowing these models to retain memory throughout the annotation task increases performance considerably. In this article, we propos…
Machines Do See Color: Using LLMs to Classify Overt and Covert Racism in Text
Extant work has identified two discursive forms of racism: overt and covert. While both forms have received attention in scholarly work, research on covert racism has been limited. Its subtle and context-specific nature has made it difficult to systematically identify covert racism in text, especially in large corpora. In this article, we first propose a theoretically driven and generalizable process to identify and classify covert and overt raci…
Political science (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Computational and Text Analysis Methods (6 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (6 works) · Public relations (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection (5 works) · Legislature (5 works)