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

Dr. 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

Congrats 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 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.

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

Congratulations 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.

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/

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

ABSTRACT:  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.

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.

Neo wins NCA award

Congratulations 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.

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.

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!

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.

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.