Winter 2024 Colloquia
Monday, January 8, 2024
Reporting After Removal: The Effects of Journalist Expulsion on Foreign News Coverage
ABSTRACT: Despite the ubiquity of journalist expulsions there is no consensus about its effect on news coverage. In this talk I discuss sources of media resiliency to extraordinary events and reveal the results of a forthcoming study measuring the effect of journalist expulsions on news coverage of China.
Matthew Debutts, Department of Communication at Stanford University
Identity Development in the Digital Context
ABSTRACT: In this talk, I describe a framework for conceptualizing the relationships between digital media and identity, and present initial results from a series of new studies that investigate the mechanisms by which identity influences, and is influenced by, social media use.
Gabriella Harari, Department of Communication at Stanford University
Monday, January 22, 2024
Truth, Trust, and the News Media
ABSTRACT: It is generally assumed that trust in the news media is a positive thing, and that there is a linkage between truthful news reporting and trust in the media. There are however reasons to believe that the linkage between truthful news reporting and mainstream news media trust is more complicated than typically assumed. First, research on confirmation bias and motivated reasoning suggests that individuals’ approach to information does not only depend on the veracity of information but on whether information aligns with people’s prior beliefs. Second, there may be dissensus with respect to what is truthful news reporting. Third, partisan and political alternative media tend to seek earning trust by the simultaneous strategy of providing information that confirms their audiences’ already held beliefs and political identities and by undermining trust in mainstream news media. Fourth, digital and social media have made it easier than ever for people to find information that confirms their prior beliefs and political identities and that may contradict and be perceived as more truthful than news reporting coming from mainstream news media. Based on this, in this talk I will argue that the relationship between truth, trust and mainstream news media need to be re-considered, and that news media may have to choose between truthful news reporting and being trusted.
Jesper Strōmbāck, Department of Journalism, Media and Communication at the University of Gothenburg
Monday, January 29, 2024
Parties on the Ground: A study of open seat nominations for the House of Representatives
ABSTRACT: American political scientists have long viewed political parties as teams of politicians whose goal is to win government office through elections. The team promises what it will do if elected and stands for re-election based on its record. More recent work has argued that modern parties mainly function to serve ambitious politicians whose goal is, once again, to gain office by winning elections.
John Zaller, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at UCLA
Monday, February 12, 2024
In Search of Alignment between Social Media Posts and Survey Responses
ABSTRACT: Social media holds promise as a source of data for social research, to augment or even replace survey data. A precondition for the latter is that the two data sources tell the same story, e.g., that the prevalence of survey responses and related posts move up and down together over time. When this is the case, the two data sources are aligned. In this talk I present two studies of alignment. The first revisits an early demonstration (O’Connor et al., 2010) of alignment between survey measures of consumer sentiment and the sentiment of social media posts containing the word “jobs”. Although we replicated the finding during the original years, 2008-2009, it did not hold up going forward. While this cast doubt on the original finding, we were not ready to rule out the possibility that surveys and social media may sometimes align. Thus, we conducted a second study, asking under what conditions alignment is more and less likely to occur, and whether hidden alignment might be uncovered by analyzing posts which express the same stance or opinion, e.g., “strongly agree,” as the survey response being tracked. We trained a language model (RoBERTa) to predict stance based on examples annotated by human judges (MTurk) and a large language model (ChatGPT). To test the approach, we compared survey measures of the public’s knowledge and beliefs about the 2020 US Census to patterns of social media posts about the Census, both from January - September 2020. We detected alignment for several survey questions, and in a few cases would have missed this without considering the stance expressed in posts. This motivates us to further explore how social media might be used for social research and to believe surveys will play a central role.
Fred Conrad, Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan
Monday, February 26, 2024
White Democrats’ Growing Support for Black Politicians in the Era of the “Great Awokening”
ABSTRACT: Equitable representation of marginalized groups is a challenge for democratic government. Resolving this challenge often requires a coalition of marginalized and dominant group members. What motivates dominant group members to join such coalitions? I will present findings from my dissertation, which investigates the case of white Democratic Americans’ increasing support for Black political candidates. An array of evidence suggests that this increase is real: A growing number of Black House members represent majority-white districts, white Democrats have recently come to approve more highly of non-white Members of Congress than similar white MCs, and a meta-analysis of 33 experiments demonstrates rising support for Black candidates among white Democratic participants. Original surveys examine potential motivations for this support, including virtue signaling, inferences about candidate ideology, electoral strategy, party norms, improving whites’ group image, racial affect, and perceptions of racial injustice. White Democrats' perceptions of injustice have increased significantly over time and predict support for Black candidates in these surveys, suggesting that injustice-focused appeals may be effective for increasing dominant group support for marginalized-group candidates. In ongoing research, I explore the gendered dimensions of this preference, and find that white Democratic women remain hesitant to support Black men candidates when they have the option of voting for a woman.
Anna Mikkelborg, Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley
Monday, March 11, 2024
Finite pool of worry and emotions in climate change tweets during COVID-19
ABSTRACT: Whether the COVID-19 pandemic has diverted public attention away from the issue of climate change is a topic that has ignited scholarly debate in recent years. Two competing theories have surfaced: the 'finite pool of worry', which asserts that concerns over the pandemic have overshadowed those for climate change, and the 'finite pool of attention', which argues that although attention to climate change has waned, worry has remained steady or even intensified, in line with affect generalization theory. Survey research seems to support the latter hypothesis more strongly. In our study, we investigate this theoretical discourse and revisit these conclusions by conducting an emotional content analysis on a novel dataset of nearly 24 million Twitter posts related to climate change, spanning from 2018 to 2022. Employing three distinct lexicons—LIWC, NRC Lex, and VADER—we find that climate change tweets exhibit a decline in expressions of fear, anxiety, and other negative emotions concurrent with COVID-19 surges. Our detailed daily-level analysis incorporates important controls such as media coverage of climate change, the occurrence of climate-related disasters like hurricanes and wildfires, and the impact of major political events, including the 2020 presidential election. The impact of COVID-19 on climate change concern was most marked in 2020, diminishing progressively in 2021 and 2022. However, the influence of COVID-19 on climate change worry has persisted, even into the third year of the pandemic.
Oleg Smirnov, Department of Political Science at Stony Brook University