The preliminary title for my dissertation is “Seeing Polarization through a Fresh Set of AIs.” Consequently, my research interests revolve around different processes behind how people develop political views, how this impacts society at large, and how we can measure them in new ways.
I am a big believer in the new opportunities computational methods bear for social scientists. However, they are by no means silver bullets and the validity of results remains key. Therefore, I try to complement and contrast results with “classic” quantitative social science data sources, such as surveys, if possible.
Mediated Cues. How Elite Polarization is Transported Through the Media
(with Väinö Yrjänäinen and Måns Magnusson)
Abstract: Political polarization of public opinion can be measured as an alignment of opinions on an issue with partisanship. But how does this alignment come about? We suggest that this is due to media reporting on elite cues. Existing research presents conflicting evidence about the relationship between elite political cues in media and public opinion formation: while Merkley and Stecula (2021) demonstrate that elite cues lead to ideological polarization (top-down), Wlezien and Soroka (2023) show that media also reflects public opinion, with elites adjusting positions based on reported public sentiment (bottom-up). To test both pathways, this study examines France using Le Monde newspaper reporting from 1980-2005, quantifying elite cues through probabilistic word embeddings and measuring issue partisanship through 25 years of cross-sectional survey data across 18 political issues. The analysis employs regression models with issue fixed effects and a comprehensive multiverse approach testing 262,125 potential issue combinations (Steegen et al., 2016). This reveals nuanced findings: while the full models including all issues do not show no conclusive evidence for newspaper reporting driving issue alignment in the public, they do find a significant effect of issue alignment on media reporting. The multiverse analysis reveals that these effects vary substantially by issue – some showing clear media-to-public transmission while others exhibit the opposite pattern. We conclude that both pathways are plausible but that the results are contingent on the political issue.
How Elite Negativity Shapes Voter Affect: Evidence from the 2021 German Federal Election
Abstract: Affective Polarization describes the phenomenon that voters dislike other parties more than their own. Past research has linked polarizing rhetoric, in which a party highlights a competitor’s shortcomings to trigger party identities to gain votes, to the emergence of affective polarization. However, these studies are limited insofar as they lack temporal and relational granularity. Using the case of Germany’s 2021 Federal Elections, I leverage a dataset of candidates’ Tweets as well as biweekly survey data to detect polarizing rhetoric and determine its effects on party evaluations. The results show that when a party directs polarizing rhetoric toward one of its competitors, the party supporters report less affect toward the competitor, leading to an increase in overall affective polarization. Moreover, the supporters of the party subjected to out-party criticism show an increase in affective polarization toward this out-party. This relationship is moderated by strength of partisan identity and robust to campaign phase, coalition signals, and the parties’ ideological distance. My findings suggest that elite rhetoric can play a crucial role in how voters perceive parties, influencing affective polarization in the public.
Do Liberals Drive Volvos Everywhere? Assessing Cultural Bundles in Sweden
(with Anastasia Menshikova, Elida Izani Binti Ibrahim, and Miriam Hurtado Bodell)
Abstract: This study investigates lifestyle polarization in Sweden’s multi-party political context, extending research on politicized lifestyle bundles beyond the U.S. case. We examine the extent to which clusters of lifestyle preferences emerge among politically active users on Swedish Twitter and analyze the factors explaining these clusters. Using a sample of 12,230 politically active Swedish Twitter users, we employ seeded Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) models to measure political preferences and cultural consumption patterns in Twitter co-following data. Our findings reveal distinctive corresponding patterns between political views and non-political spheres. Partisan belonging significantly drives lifestyle polarization in areas such as media consumption, cultural institutions, religion, politics, and humor. This research contributes to understanding polarization dynamics in a multi-party system, explicating lifestyle polarization patterns on Swedish Twitter over a decade (2010-2020). By using behavioral digital traces, we complement previous survey-based work and uncover lifestyle polarization structures that account for relationships between individuals and their cultural preferences. Our study provides a contribution to the broader discussion on how political polarization may impact social cohesion in diverse political contexts.
Media Slant as Political Refraction. Measuring Political Media Slant and Polarization in the French Media Landscape
(with Rubing Shen, Arnault Chatelain, and Etienne Ollion)
Abstract: This study introduces a novel method for measuring media slant in newspaper content, addressing limitations of existing approaches. We develop a content-based measure grounded in Bourdieu’s field theory concept of refraction, which posits systematic differences between political and journalistic language due to field-specific norms. We use word embeddings to identify the political bias of micro-frames, which allows for scalable and fine-grained analysis of media slant. To demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, we examine evidence of increasing polarization among mainstream French national daily newspapers from 2000-2010. We analyze a comprehensive sample of articles from Le Monde, Libération, Le Figaro, Les Echos, and La Croix using our semi-supervised technique. Thereby, we contribute to the literature on media polarization and its potential impacts on democratic discourse. Our method enables precise estimation of media slant at the paragraph level, hence enabling nuanced comparisons between newspapers, articles, and journalists. By providing a valid and reliable content-based measure of media slant, this study offers a valuable tool for researchers and policymakers concerned with media polarization and its societal effects. Our findings have implications for understanding the role of traditional media in shaping public opinion.
Perceptions of Intergenerational Mobility in Germany, Sweden, and the UK: Insights from Machine-Learning Text Analysis
(with Alexi Gugushvili and Patrick Präg; preprint; currently under review at European Journal of Sociology)
Abstract: Research on intergenerational mobility has traditionally focused on objective markers of socioeconomic position. In this study, we argue that the subjective aspects of intergenerational mobility deserve greater attention and empirically explore what individuals report they compare when they gauge their intergenerational mobility trajectories. Drawing on representative survey data from Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, as well as machine-learning-driven text analyses of open-ended survey responses, we reveal that, in addition to conventional measures of intergenerational mobility, such as education, occupational status, and income, individuals consider a diverse array of factors, including family life, home ownership, and lifestyle choices. Our findings highlight the heterogeneity of these comparisons across different countries, genders, and generations. We identify significant variations in the dimensions of intergenerational comparisons, such as the prominence of education in Sweden, the focus on housing in the United Kingdom, and the salience of freedom, opportunity, and lifestyle in Germany. Furthermore, gender differences reveal that females are more likely to emphasize education and family life, while males focus on income and occupational status. These insights provide a deeper understanding of the subjective dimensions of intergenerational mobility and contribute to ongoing debates in social stratification research and general social theory.