Politics and political conflict often occur in the written and spoken word. Scholars have long recognized this, but the massive costs of analyzing even moderately sized collections of texts have ...hindered their use in political science research. Here lies the promise of automated text analysis: it substantially reduces the costs of analyzing large collections of text. We provide a guide to this exciting new area of research and show how, in many instances, the methods have already obtained part of their promise. But there are pitfalls to using automated methods—they are no substitute for careful thought and close reading and require extensive and problem-specific validation. We survey a wide range of new methods, provide guidance on how to validate the output of the models, and clarify misconceptions and errors in the literature. To conclude, we argue that for automated text methods to become a standard tool for political scientists, methodologists must contribute new methods and new methods of validation.
The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged nearly every aspect of life and superseded issues at the core of populist radical right (PRR) parties' ideology, dispossessing them of one of their main ...narratives. This also challenged the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a relatively young but strong PRR party in opposition. We explore how the party has adjusted its policy supply to this unprecedented situation and how this has affected its popularity among German voters, building our analysis on press releases issued by the AfD between January 2020 and March 2021, vote intention data and recent election results. Initially, the party's reaction was inconsistent, but from autumn 2020 the AfD focused on fuelling discontent with the government's lockdown measures, acting as a supporter of the anti-coronavirus demonstrations. It framed its response as elite critique. So far, its siding with the lockdown protesters, however, has not had any positive effect on support for the party.
Objective To identify the source (press releases or news) of distortions, exaggerations, or changes to the main conclusions drawn from research that could potentially influence a reader’s health ...related behaviour. Design Retrospective quantitative content analysis. Setting Journal articles, press releases, and related news, with accompanying simulations. Sample Press releases (n=462) on biomedical and health related science issued by 20 leading UK universities in 2011, alongside their associated peer reviewed research papers and news stories (n=668). Main outcome measures Advice to readers to change behaviour, causal statements drawn from correlational research, and inference to humans from animal research that went beyond those in the associated peer reviewed papers. Results 40% (95% confidence interval 33% to 46%) of the press releases contained exaggerated advice, 33% (26% to 40%) contained exaggerated causal claims, and 36% (28% to 46%) contained exaggerated inference to humans from animal research. When press releases contained such exaggeration, 58% (95% confidence interval 48% to 68%), 81% (70% to 93%), and 86% (77% to 95%) of news stories, respectively, contained similar exaggeration, compared with exaggeration rates of 17% (10% to 24%), 18% (9% to 27%), and 10% (0% to 19%) in news when the press releases were not exaggerated. Odds ratios for each category of analysis were 6.5 (95% confidence interval 3.5 to 12), 20 (7.6 to 51), and 56 (15 to 211). At the same time, there was little evidence that exaggeration in press releases increased the uptake of news. Conclusions Exaggeration in news is strongly associated with exaggeration in press releases. Improving the accuracy of academic press releases could represent a key opportunity for reducing misleading health related news.
We examine a routine and timely disclosure, earnings press releases, to determine the extent to which several novel qualitative elements of such disclosures are associated with changes in sell‐side ...financial analysts' information environment. Using a comprehensive set of GARCH‐based (generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity) proxies, we examine how disclosure readability's components, across‐document textual similarity, and within‐document lexical diversity alter analysts' information environment. We find that readability in the form of shorter sentences, textual similarity, and lexical diversity are strongly related to decreases in analysts' uncertainty. Further, shorter sentences and lexical diversity improve both public and private information precision, whereas similarity affects solely analysts' private information precision. While the GARCH‐based proxies allow us to alleviate concerns regarding potentially spurious inferences (Sheng and Thevenot 2012), we note as a caveat that such an estimation restricts our inferences to large, stable, and heavily followed firms. These findings should be of interest to analysts who may wish to explore the latent information contained within the qualitative elements of disclosure, regulators who direct the form and content of disclosure, and academics who study the use (and possible misuse) of various forms of information and its presentation.
How do individual politicians use the news media to reach their political goals? This study addresses the question by proposing an actor‐centered, functional approach. We distinguish 2 essential ...functions (and subfunctions) the mass media have for political elites. The media are a source of information; politicians depend on it for pure information and they can profit from the momentum generated by media information. The media also are an arena elites need access to in order to promote themselves and their issues. These 2 functions offer certain politicians a structural advantage over others and, hence, are relevant for the power struggle among political elites. A systematic functional account enables comparisons of the role of the media across politicians and political systems.
Brand Buzz in the Echoverse Hewett, Kelly; Rand, William; Rust, Roland T. ...
Journal of marketing,
05/2016, Letnik:
80, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Social media sites have created a reverberating "echoverse" for brand communication, forming complex feedback loops ("echoes") between the "universe" of corporate communications, news media, and ...user-generated social media. To understand these feedback loops, the authors process longitudinal, unstructured data using computational linguistics techniques and analyze them using econometric methods. By assembling one of the most comprehensive data sets in the brand communications literature with corporate communications, news stories, social media, and business outcomes, the authors document the echoverse (i.e., feedback loops between all of these sources). Furthermore, the echoverse has changed as online word of mouth has become prevalent. Over time, online word of mouth has fallen into a negativity spiral, with negative messages leading to greater volume, and firms are adjusting their communications strategies in response. The nature of brand communications has been transformed by online technology as corporate communications move increasingly from one to many (e.g., advertising) to one to one (e.g., Twitter) while consumer word of mouth moves from one to one (e.g., conversations) to one to many (e.g., social media). The results indicate that companies benefit from using social media (e.g., Twitter) for personalized customer responses, although there is still a role for traditional brand communications (e.g., press releases, advertising). The evolving echoverse requires managers to rethink brand communication strategies, with online communications becoming increasingly central.
To disseminate research, scholars once relied on university media services or journal press releases, but today any academic can turn to Twitter to share their published work with a broader audience. ...The possibility that scholars can push their research out, rather than hope that it is pulled in, holds the potential for scholars to draw wide attention to their research. In this manuscript, we examine whether there are systematic differences in the types of scholars who most benefit from this push model. Specifically, we investigate the extent to which there are gender differences in the dissemination of research via Twitter. We carry out our analyses by tracking tweet patterns for articles published in six journals across two fields (political science and communication), and we pair this Twitter data with demographic and educational data about the authors of the published articles, as well as article citation rates. We find considerable evidence that, overall, article citations are positively correlated with tweets about the article, and we find little evidence to suggest that author gender affects the transmission of research in this new media.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The past decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in the partisan polarization of the American electorate. Scholarly investigation of this topic has coincided with the media's portrayal of a ...polity deeply divided along partisan lines. Yet little research so far has considered the consequences of the media's coverage of political polarization. We show that media coverage of polarization increases citizens' beliefs that the electorate is polarized. Furthermore, the media's depiction of a polarized electorate causes voters to moderate their own issue positions but increases their dislike of the opposing party. These empirical patterns are consistent with our theoretical argument that polarized exemplars in journalistic coverage serve as anti-cues to media consumers. Our findings have important implications for understanding current and future trends in political polarization.
This paper explores the extent to which firms targeted by consumer boycotts strategically react to defend their public image by using prosocial claims: expressions of the organization's commitment to ...socially acceptable norms, beliefs, and activities. We argue that prosocial claims operate as an impression management tactic meant to protect targeted firms by diluting the negative media attention attracted by the boycott. We test our hypotheses using a sample of 221 boycotts announced between 1990 and 2005. Results suggest that boycotted firms do significantly increase their prosocial claims activity after a boycott is announced. Firms are likely to react with a larger increase in prosocial claims when the boycott is more threatening (it receives more media attention), when the firm has a higher reputation, or when the firm engaged in more prosocial claims before the boycott. We demonstrate that firms fall back on their established impression management strategies when they face a reputational threat and will increase these previously perfected performances as the threat increases. In this way, the severity of a threat positively moderates the relationship between a firm's prior performance repertoire and future performance repertoire, a mechanism we refer to as "threat amplification." When an organization with high reputational standing has bolstered its position by using prosocial claims in its past performance repertoire, however, it will perceive itself to be shielded from movement attacks, decreasing the likelihood of any defensive response, a mechanism we call "buffering." Our findings contribute to impression management by exploring the use of impression management in response to a movement attack and highlighting the important role that a firm's pre-threat positioning plays in its response to an image threat.
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