Papers Under Review
Social Media and Political Agenda Setting. Political Communication: revise & resubmit (with
Fabrizio Gilardi,
Theresa Gessler, and
Maël Kubli).
What is the role of social media in political agenda setting? Digital platforms have reduced the gatekeeping power of traditional media and, potentially, they have increased the capacity of various kinds of actors to shape the agenda. We study this question in the Swiss context by examining the connections between three agendas: the traditional media agenda, the social media agenda of parties, and the social media agenda of politicians. Specifically, we validate and apply supervised machine learning classifiers to categorize 2.78 million articles published in 84 newspapers, 6,500 tweets posted on official party accounts, and 210,000 tweets posted by politicians on their own accounts from January 2018 until December 2019. We first use the classifier to measure the salience of the four most relevant issues of the period: the environment, Europe, gender equality, and immigration. Then, using a vector autoregression (VAR) approach, we analyze the relationship between the three agendas. Results show that not only do the traditional media agenda, the social media agenda of parties, and the social media agenda of politicians influence one another but, overall, no agenda leads the others more than it is led by them. There is one important exception: for the environment issue, the social media agenda of parties is more predictive of the traditional media agenda than vice-versa. These findings underscore how closely different agendas are tied together, but also show that advocacy campaigns may play an important role in both constraining and enabling parties to push their specific agendas.
Evidence for the Irrelevance of Irrelevant Events. Political Science Research and Methods: revise & resubmit (with
Liam Kneafsey).
Do ‘irrelevant events’ affect voting behaviour? Moving beyond the case of the United States, we investigate whether sports results influence political opinions. We match constituency-level election data from Irish general elections between 1922 and 2020 and local elections between 1942 and 2019 with the results of matches in the Gaelic football and hurling championships, the most popular sports in Ireland. A difference-in-differences design does not suggest any relationship between match results of regional teams and support for incumbent candidates or government parties. These findings also hold when applying an ‘unexpected event during survey design’ approach to representative surveys conducted throughout two seasons. Our results have important implications for the literature on retrospective voting, opinion formation, and citizen competence.
Moderators of the Incumbency Advantage: Evidence from Irish Local Elections, 1942–2019. Electoral Studies: revise & resubmit (with
Michael Jankowski).
Do candidates in local elections in a system using proportional representation benefit from an incumbency advantage? And which factors moderate the strength of this incumbency bonus? Analyzing seven decades of Irish local elections (1942–2019) conducted under proportional representation through the single transferable vote, we reassess and extend the mixed evidence on the incumbency advantage under proportional representation and in lower-order elections. By applying the Regression Discontinuity Design, we find that the incumbency advantage is at least as strong in Irish local as in general elections, which are conducted under the identical electoral system. In addition, we show that marginally elected candidates in local elections have much higher reelection probabilities when they do not face a high-quality candidate in their local electoral area after getting elected. The results point the the importance of name recognition as a major driver of the incumbency advantage.
Social Media and Policy Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Switzerland. Swiss Political Science Review: revise & resubmit (with
Fabrizio Gilardi,
Theresa Gessler, and
Maël Kubli).
We study the role of social media in debates regarding two policy responses to COVID-19 in Switzerland: face-mask rules and contact-tracing apps. We use a dictionary classifier to categorize 612,177 tweets by parties, politicians, and the public as well as 441,458 articles published in 76 newspapers from February until August 2020. We distinguish between “problem” (COVID-19) and “solutions” (face masks and contact-tracing apps) and, using a vector autoregression approach, we analyze the relationship between their salience on social and traditional media, as well as among different groups on social media. We find that overall attention to COVID-19 was not driven by endogenous dynamics between the different actors. By contrast, the debate on face masks was led by the attentive public and by politicians, whereas parties and newspapers followed. The results illustrate how social media challenge the capacity of party and media elites to craft a consensus regarding the appropriateness of different measures as responses to a major crisis.
Gender, Candidate Emotional Expression, and Voter Reactions During Televised Debates (with
Constantine Boussalis,
Travis G. Coan, and
Mirya R. Holman).
Voters evaluate politicians not just by what they say, but also how they say it, via facial displays of emotions and vocal pitch. Candidate characteristics can shape how leaders use – and how voters react to – nonverbal cues. Drawing on role congruity expectations, we focus on how gender shapes the use of and reactions to facial, voice, and textual communication in political debates. Using full-length debate videos from four German national elections (2005–2017) and a minor debate in 2017, we employ computer vision, machine learning, and text analysis to extract facial displays of emotion, vocal pitch, and speech sentiment. Consistent with our expectations, Angela Merkel expresses less anger and is less emotive than her male opponents. We combine second-by-second candidate emotions data with continuous responses recorded by live audiences. We find that voters punish Merkel for anger displays and reward her happiness and general emotional displays.
Building Research Infrastructures to Study Digital Technology and Politics: Lessons from Switzerland (with
Fabrizio Gilardi,
Lucien Baumgartner,
Clau Dermont,
Karsten Donnay,
Theresa Gessler,
Maël Kubli, and
Lucas Leemann).
The effects of digital technology on political processes is an important phenomenon that, due to several structural problems, remains poorly understood. A key problem is the lack of adequate research infrastructures to study digital technology and politics, or the lack of access. We first discuss the challenges many social scientists face and then present the infrastructure we built in Switzerland to overcome them, using COVID-19 as an example. We conclude by discussing seven lessons we learned: automatization is key; avoid data hoarding; outsource some parts of the infrastructure, but not others; focus on substantive questions; share data in the context of collaborations; engage in targeted public outreach; collaboration beats competition. We hope that our experience will be helpful to other researchers pursuing similar goals.
The Compass of Irish Politics is Moving to the Left (with
Aidan Regan).
It has often been assumed that Ireland is an outlier in comparative politics. It never had a left-right divide in parliament, and for decades, the dominant centrist political parties competed around a centre-right policy agenda. The absence of an explicit left-right divide in party competition and parliament was assumed to mean that Irish voters, on average, occupy centre-right policy preferences. The dominant parties were simply responding to what the average voter wanted. Using the 2020 Irish electoral survey and data from all Irish election studies since 2002, we show that this is no longer the case. The average Irish voter now leans to the centre-left. This self-identification on the left is consistent with policy preferences on taxes, spending, and government interventions to reduce inequality. This left-leaning trend is consistent even when Sinn Féin voters are excluded from the data, or when using a different survey that explicitly explains to respondents the substantive meaning of the left-right dimension. We show who exactly these growing voters are, and whom they are voting for. The paper analyses different theoretical arguments to explain why this leftward shift has taken place, and concludes that it is related to economic conflict and the changing class-based structure of the Irish political economy, and the emergence of Sinn Féin as the main opposition party.
Ongoing Projects
Explaining (In)Congruence Between Politicians’ Campaign Promises and Subsequent Legislative Priorities (with
Naofumi Fujimura).
Causes and Electoral Effects of Nostalgic Rhetoric: A Cross-National Analysis of Party Communication (with
Sven-Oliver Proksch).
Responding to Whom? Parties’ Issue Emphasis Strategies in a Dynamic Media Environment (with
Fabrizio Gilardi,
Theresa Gessler, and
Maël Kubli).
Efficient and Scalable Analysis of Political Text (with
Kenneth Benoit,
Patrick Chester, and
Michael Laver).
Do Candidates Tweet About Oirish Sheep? Examining the Irish #GE2020 Campaign on Social Media Using an Images-as-Data Approach (with
Mark Belford,
James P Cross,
Derek Greene, and
Martijn Schoonvelde).
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