Elections

And the last speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is my colleague Sebastian Svegaard, presenting one of the research projects within my Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Here are his slides:

The final IAMCR 2023 session for today is one that also contains a couple of presentation from my current Laureate Fellowship project, but we start with Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on political polarisation on Twitter in Catalunya and Spain. It’s important to study cases like this because polarisation research remains so dominated by studies of the bipolar US system, which simply don’t translate well to anywhere else.

The next paper in this AoIR 2022 session is by my predecessor as AoIR president, the excellent Jennifer Stromer-Galley. Her focus is on the rhetoric of Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the 2020 US presidential election. Such leadership communication matters, and actively shapes the public understanding of politics – as the 6 January 2021 coup attempt at the US Capitol clearly shows.

The next presenter in this AoIR 2022 session is my current University of Zürich colleague Sina Blassnig, who shifts our focus to the users of social media platforms. They need political knowledge to make rational decisions, but this is difficult in today’s high-choice informational environments; one key source for such information, of course, are search engines, but research on their role with regard to political issues and referenda remains very limited.

I’m chairing the next AoIR 2022 session, which starts with Márton Bene and a focus on populist political communication, which is highly people-centred, anti-elitist, and targetting dangerous ‘others’. Social media have become a key space for such populist communication, and populist elements are often strategically combined with other content elements, and conditioned by actors’ political positions and goals.

The final paper in this AoIR 2022 session is presented by my colleague Dan Angus, who shifts our focus to patterns of advertising in the 2022 Australian federal election. The slides are below, too. There are a number of tools for the analysis of online political advertising that have started to emerge in recent times, exploring for instance ad spending, audience targetting, and political messaging. But we need more data from the platforms and develop further tools to do this kind of work at scale and discover dodgy activities. This is also critical for journalists, and academic collaborations with journalists.

Our papers on the Australian election in this AoIR 2022 session start with my presentation on the patterns of social media engagement during the election. Here are the slides: