Announcements

See the calendar on the right for the full schedule.

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

COPS Alumnus Elizabeth Stoycheff has a first-authored article in the November issue of Political Communication on Internet and Democratization

Elizabeth StoycheffDr. Elizabeth Stoycheff, an alumnus of COPS and currently an assistant professor at Wayne State University, has a first-authored article in this month's Political Communication examining the cross-national relationship between Internet penetration, Internet use, and democratic attitudes. The title and abstract (with link to the article) are below. Congrats!

What’s the Bandwidth for Democracy? Deconstructing Internet Penetration and Citizen Attitudes About Governance

Recent world events have highlighted the democratic potential of information and communication technologies. This article draws upon the democracy literature to develop a multilevel conceptual framework that links country-level Internet penetration and individual-level Internet use to citizen attitudes about governance in 34 developing countries. In doing so, it deconstructs “Internet penetration” into three dimensions—hardware (e.g., computers), users, and broadband—to provide greater theoretical specificity about how Internet diffusion leads citizens to adopt democratic attitudes. Results from multilevel analyses indicate that individual Internet use and the diffusion of Internet hardware shape citizens’ perceptions of the supply of democracy in their countries, and individual Internet use and diffusion of broadband lead citizens to adopt stronger democratic preferences. Theoretical and normative implications are discussed.

Hyunjin Song Lead-Authored Communication Theory Paper Now Online

Hyunjin SongCongrats to (Hyun)Jin Song, whose first-authored paper "Metacognitive Model of Ambivalence: The Role of Multiple Beliefs and Metacognitions in Creating Attitude Ambivalence" in Communication Theory is now available online: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/comt.12050/abstract This is one of three lead or sole-authored papers Jin currently has in press; the other two are at Journal of Communication and Political Communication.

Nisbet Gives Talk at USC

Erik NisbetErik Nisbet gave a guest lecture on October 22nd at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication entitled "The Media War Over Crimea and Russian Public Opinion" as part of its Center for Public Diplomacy's "Conversations in Public Diplomacy" regular lecture series.

Friday, October 24, 2014

Garrett Gives Talk as Part of University of Missouri Political Communication Institute's Distinguished Lecture Series

Kelly GarrettCongratulations to Kelly Garrett on his October 17th presentation "Political Misperception in the Age of the Internet" as part of the University of Missouri's Political Communication Institute's Distinguished Lecture Series.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

COPS Alum Lindsay Hoffman to Moderate U.S. Senate & House Debates in Delaware

Former COPS member and University of Delaware associate professor Lindsay Hoffman will be one of the three moderators of state of Delaware's U.S. Senate and House debates tonight. Pretty cool! http://sites.udel.edu/debates2014/

Friday, September 12, 2014

Bond's Paper on Facebook and Ideology Accepted in American Political Science Review

Robert Bond's paper on the use of Facebook in Estimating Ideology has been accepted for publication by the American Political Science Review. Details are below. Congrats Robert!

TITLE: Quantifying Social Media’s Political Space: Estimating Ideology from Publicly Revealed Preferences on Facebook
AUTHORS: Robert Bond and Solomon Messing
Robert BondABSTRACT:  We demonstrate that social media data represent a useful resource for testing models of legislative and individual-level political behavior and attitudes. First, we develop a model to estimate the ideology of politicians and their supporters using social media data on individual citizens’ endorsements of political figures. Our measure allows us to place politicians and more than 6 million citizens who are active in social media on the same metric. We validate the ideological estimates that result from the scaling process by showing they correlate highly with existing measures of ideology from Congress, and with individual-level self- reported political views. Finally, we use these measures to study the relationship between ideology and age, social relationships and ideology, and the relationship between friend ideology and turnout.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Song has Sole-Author Paper with Meta-Analayis of ERGM Results Accepted in Journal of Communication

Congratulations to Hyunjin Song, who recently had a sole-authored paper accepted for publication in Journal of Communication. The manuscript, "Uncovering the Structural Underpinnings of Political Discussion Networks: Evidence from an Exponential Random Graph Model," is one of the first such analyses published in communication, and almost certainly the first published that integrates 25 such analyses using meta-analysis techniques. Congrats Jin!

Former COPS Member Lindsay Hoffman Quoted in New York Times

A shout out to founding COPS member Lindsay Hoffman, now associate professor at the University of Delaware, who was quoted today in an article in the New York Times on the role of Facebook in political campaigns.

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Neo wins NCA award

Rachel NeoCongratulations to Rachel Neo. Her paper, “Examining the Influence of SNS Network Homogeneity on Actual Voting Behavior Via Affective Responses toward In and Out-Group Presidential Candidates As Intervening Variables” was named one of four Top Student Papers in the Political Communication Division of the National Communication Association.

Monday, August 11, 2014

Stoycheff, Nisbet win AEJMC Paper Award

Congratulations to former (is there such a thing? COPS-4-LIFE!) COPS member Elizabeth Stoycheff, COPS member Erik Nisbet, and Dmitry Epstein for winning first place in the Robert L. Stevenson Paper Competition of the International Communication Division of AEJMC. Their paper, "Differential Effects of Information-Rich and Information-Poor Internet Use on Citizens' Demand for Democracy" was presented last week at the AEJMC conference in Montreal.

Nisbet, Cooper and Garrett Award Winning Paper in Press at ANNALS

Congratulations to Erik Nisbet, Kaatie Cooper, and Kelly Garrett for their top-3 paper award winning AEJMC paper, "The Partisan Brain: How Dissonant Science Messages Lead Conservatives and Liberals to (Dis)trust Science." The paper was presented to the ComSHER division at the AEJMC conference last week, and is in press at the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. It can be found here: http://rkellygarrett.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Prepress-Nisbet-et-al.-Partisan-brain.pdf

Garrett, Carhahan & Lynch Paper Wins Best Paper in Political Behavior

Congratulations are in order for Kelly Garrett and political science graduate students Dustin Carnahan and Emily Lynch. Their collaborative paper, "A Turn Toward Avoidance? Selective Exposure to Online Political Information, 2004-2008," was recently awarded the Best Paper in Political Behavior by the American Political Science Association's Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior section. Their paper is the inaugural winner of this award. An abstract of the paper can be found here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-011-9185-6.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Weeks accepts position, wins award

Many congratulations to Brian Weeks. Brian, who defended his dissertation last week, has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna. And this week, the APSA Political Communication section has awarded Brian the Timothy Cook Best Graduate Student Paper Award for his 2013 paper “Feeling is Believing? The Influence of Emotions on Citizens’ False Political Beliefs”. Nice work, Brian!

Monday, April 28, 2014

Mershon Center Event: "Interdisciplinary Studies of Political Behavior and the Use of ‘Big Data’ "

The Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Security Studies, in collaboration with Cross-national Studies: Interdisciplinary Research and Training Program (CONSIRT) and the Polish Academy of Sciences, presents "Interdisciplinary Studies of Political Behavior: From Elections to Protests", a conference held at the Mershon Center. This conference is part of a larger event held at OSU from May 6-9, 2014. The event opens with the conference, as detailed below, and is followed by the Workshop “Comparability of Data” (May 8-9), held in the Department of Sociology.

Information and registration:  http://mershoncenter.osu.edu/eventcalendar/icalrepeat.detail/2014/05/06/198/-/interdisciplinary-studies-of-political-behavior-from-elections-to-protests.html

Schedule: http://mershoncenter.osu.edu/media/media/publications/misc-pdfs/Conference%20Schedule%20Mershon%20May6_7%202014.pdf

The focus of this event is the relationship between political participation and democracy in light of both theoretical understanding and empirically based research.  Analyzing individual and contextual determinants of political behavior can be approached from various theoretical approaches used in political science, sociology, economics and other disciplines. Empirically, most studies in the field employ data from a single cross-national survey project (e.g World Values Survey, or European Social Survey). Yet, the wealth of existing information is much greater, as international surveys could be harmonized ex post and turned into ‘big data’ consisting of unusually large number of variables with individuals nested in countries and time periods. This is the goal of the Harmonization Project, which has selected 21 international public opinion surveys for harmonization consideration, to create online accessible, comparable measurements of social values, action and demographics with global coverage.  This project, of which the May event is a part, is currently funded by both Poland’s National Science Centre and OSU’s Mershon Center, and fits the OSU Data Analytics initiative.  

The Conference brings together noted scholars in the field of democracy, politics and protest, and cross-national methodology, to contribute – via lectures, presentations and discussions in a multidisciplinary forum – to furthering our understanding of democracy and political participation around the world.  The Workshop is devoted to key technical issues of data comparability assessment following the harmonization of data from international public opinion survey projects.


Monday, March 31, 2014

Lance Bennett - “The Logic of Connective Action: Public Engagement in the Digital Age”

In lieu of our regularly scheduled meeting next week, COPS members are strongly encouraged to attend Lance Bennett's talk at the Mershon Center.  Advanced registration is encouraged.  

-- > Register: go.osu.edu/bennettl

Professor Bennett will be well known to anyone studying political communication.  He is a prolific scholar whose work has shaped the field.  He will be speaking about his latest book, The Logic of Connective Action.  A full bio and abstract are below.

Bio

Lance Bennett, Ruddick C. Lawrence Professor of Communication at University of Washington-Seattle, will deliver “The Logic of Connective Action: Public Engagement in the Digital Age” at 3:30 p.m. Monday (4/7) at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies.  Bennett is director of the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, which studies how communication processes and technologies can enhance citizen engagement.  Bennett has published and lectured widely on media and information systems in civic life. His research areas include theories of citizenship and civic life; press-government relations; communication and the organization of national and transnational advocacy; the rise of the networked society; and how digital media are changing the public sphere.

He has received the Ithiel de Sola Pool Lectureship and the Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award from the American Political Science Association; Doctor of Philosophy, honoris causa, from Uppsala University; the Olof Palme Visiting Professorship in Sweden; and a National Communication Association Distinguished Scholar career award. His most recent book is The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics, with Alexandra Segerberg (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Abstract

This presentation will explain the rise of personalized, large-scale publics in which diverse populations address the common problems of our times such as economic fairness and climate change. These episodes of mass engagement often entail diminished or modified roles for conventional organizations such as parties, NGOs, or movement groups that orchestrated most of political life in the 20th century. In some cases, formal brick and mortar organizations are almost absent, as in digitally mediated crowds such as Occupy Wall Street, in which dispersed local camps were coordinated through numerous technology platforms that enabled the flow of inclusive discourses such as "We Are the 99%."

In such mobilizations, communication operates as an organizational process that may replace or supplement familiar forms of collective action based on organizational resource mobilization, leadership, and collective action framing. A second notable type of connective action in today's public engagement picture involves more conventional political organizations such as NGOs, but more in background roles of deploying networking technologies, and personalized communication logics that enable diverse pathways for engagement with various political causes. The talk explores how power is organized in these communication-based networks, how traditional media engage with them, and what political outcomes may result.

Monday, March 17, 2014

Brendan Nyhan - Tipping the Scales - 3/19 @ noon

Brendan Nyhan, an Asst. Professor of Political Science at Dartmouth College, will give a talk this week in the Political Science department as part of the Workshop in American Politics.  The talk, which is titled "Tipping the scales? Testing for political influence on public corruption prosecutions", will be held in the Spencer Room on Wednesday, March 19th, at noon. Contact Kelly for a copy of the paper.

Nyhan co-authored "All the President's Spin" in 2004, and has received considerable media attention for his work on the difficulty of correcting inaccurate beliefs about politics and science.  He also serves as a political analyst for the New York Times.

Monday, March 03, 2014

Being an effective reviewer

ICA has posted a couple brief articles about reviewing for journals that may help set the stage for our conversation this afternoon.

http://www.icahdq.org/membersnewsletter/JAN14_ART0007.asp
http://icanewsletter.com/2013/12/02/serving-as-a-peer-reviewer-some-dos-of-being-a-constructive-critic/

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

International Summer School on (New) Media Effects on Electoral Behaviour, to be held from 7-11 July 2014 in Milan

The Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Milan (Italy) and the Political Communication Division of the International Communication Association (ICA) are pleased to announce the 4th edition of the International Summer School on (New) Media Effects on Electoral Behaviour, to be held from 7-11 July 2014 in Milan.

The School addresses the main theoretical and empirical questions at the intersection of political communication, political science, and political sociology, with a special focus on the impact of communication factors, from television to the new digital media, on electoral participation, political attitudes, and voting behaviour.

The lecturers are internationally renowned academics. Confirmed speakers include Patricia Moy, Rachel Gibson, Andrew Chadwick, Stefano Iacus, David Karpf, Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, Sara Hobolt, Claes de Vreese, Magdalena Wojcieszak, Winfried Schulz (see the School’s webpage for more information and for the speakers of the past editions: www.polcomm2014.net).

Student participants come from around the world; countries represented at previous Summer Schools include USA, Canada, Colombia, Brazil, UK, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Russia, Poland, Germany, The Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Serbia, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, among others.

Building on its successful experience, this year’s Summer School will present another opportunity for 30 PhD candidates and early career academics in Communication, Sociology, Psychology and Political Science to attend an intensive, 5 day-long Program that consists of two morning lectures daily and paper presentations and discussions in the afternoon. Furthermore, two workshops on Big Data research methods an on writing for scholarly journals will be offered during the week.

Candidates interested in participating in the Summer School should submit a 3-page research proposal or an extended abstract of a research paper on issues related to the main theme of the Summer School. Submissions should include the application form, a CV, a brief bio (max. 100 words) mentioning main research interests and ongoing projects, as well as a supporting recommendation letter from an advisor or another academic supervisor endorsing the candidate with a brief explication of why the candidate will benefit from the Summer School.

All participants are expected to be present for all the 5 days of presentations and training, contribute actively to the discussions, as well as get acquainted with the materials distributed before their arrival to the Summer School. A Certificate and 6 ECTS will be awarded to each participant successfully completing the School.

Application deadline – 12 April 2014
Selected candidates will be contacted – 3 May 2014
Registration deadline – 20 May 2014


This year the School will offer 3 tuition waivers and 5 travel grants: more information available at the School’s website.

*For more information about the program and application instructions* please see www.polcomm2014.net

If you need any further information please do not hesitate to contact us: summerschool.polcomm@gmail.com

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Hyunjin Song wins a Top Student Paper Award at ICA, lead authored paper in Political Communication

Congratulations to Hyunjin Song, who was recently notified that he has won a top student paper award from the Mass Communication division of ICA for his paper: "The Matthew Effect or the Equalizing Effect? Mutual Causation and 'Moderating Mediator' Relationships Between Media Use and Political Discussion." Jin is also first author of a paper accepted over the winter break for publication in Political Communication: "The structure of communication networks matters: How network diversity, centrality, and context influence political ambivalence, participation, and knowledge."