Politische Diskurse in Print- und Online-Medien: eine empirische Analyse am Beispiel der Novelle des Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetzes 2014

Gerade im Zuge der Etablierung digitaler Technologien erschließen Massenmedien immer neue Distributionskanäle. Diese Ausdifferenzierung der Kommunikationsplattformen resultiert in eine Fragmentierung der Öffentlichkeit. Wir untersuchen mithilfe eines Vergleichs der Online- und Print-Diskurse um die EEG-Novelle 2014, inwiefern Diskurse durch ihre mediale Plattform geprägt werden. Wir zeigen, dass sich in unserer Anwendung Diskurse in Print- und Online-Medien signifikant voneinander unterscheiden, sowohl in Hinblick auf das Standing unterschiedlicher Akteure als auch auf die Argumente – in ungefähr ähnlichem Ausmaß wie die Berichterstattung zwischen den Medienhäusern differiert. Die Subdiskurse unterscheiden sich dabei dennoch in ihrer Struktur nicht fundamental

State anxiety by itself does not change political attitudes: A threat of shock experiment

Previous research suggests that state anxiety may sway political attitudes. However, previous experimental procedures induced anxiety using political contexts (e.g., social or economic threat). In a pre-registered laboratory experiment, we set out to examine if anxiety that is unrelated to political contexts can influence political attitudes. We induced anxiety with a threat of shock paradigm, void of any political connotation. All participants were instructed that they might receive an electric stimulus during specified threat periods and none during safety periods. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: Political attitudes (implicit and explicit) were assessed under safety in one condition and under threat in the other. Psychometric, as well as physiological data (skin conductance, heart rate), confirmed that anxiety was induced successfully. However, this emotional state did not alter political attitudes. In a Bayesian analytical approach, we confirmed the absence of an effect. Our results suggest that state anxiety by itself does not sway political attitudes. Previously observed effects that were attributed to anxiety may be conditional on a political context of threat

The Crowdsourced Replication Initiative: Investigating Immigration and Social Policy Preferences. Executive Report.

In an era of mass migration, social scientists, populist parties and social movements raise concerns over the future of immigration-destination societies. What impacts does this have on policy and social solidarity? Comparative cross-national research, relying mostly on secondary data, has findings in different directions. There is a threat of selective model reporting and lack of replicability. The heterogeneity of countries obscures attempts to clearly define data-generating models. P-hacking and HARKing lurk among standard research practices in this area.This project employs crowdsourcing to address these issues. It draws on replication, deliberation, meta-analysis and harnessing the power of many minds at once. The Crowdsourced Replication Initiative carries two main goals, (a) to better investigate the linkage between immigration and social policy preferences across countries, and (b) to develop crowdsourcing as a social science method. The Executive Report provides short reviews of the area of social policy preferences and immigration, and the methods and impetus behind crowdsourcing plus a description of the entire project. Three main areas of findings will appear in three papers, that are registered as PAPs or in process

Die Reformen des Wahlrechts zum Deutschen Bundestag 2011 und 2013 im öffentlichen Diskurs

The German electoral law to the federal parliament was reformed in 2011 and in 2013 . While political scientists have extensively evaluated consequences of these reforms, the role of the public discourse has been largely neglected . We analyze articles from three leading German newspapers (FAZ, SZ, Welt) on this topic and find the debate around the reforms to be dominated by parties and political institutions . Scientists, interest groups, and journalists have only played minor roles . Regarding content, the discourse largely focused on surplus seats, reform speed, and a proposal by the CDU/CSU‑FDP coalition government in 2011 . A broad public debate in which multiple social groups could participate has not taken place . From a normative perspective this is problematic since the lack of a public debate might have contributed to the poor quality of the reform’s result

How do coalition signals shape voting behavior? Revealing the mediating role of coalition expectations

Existing empirical research suggests that there are two mechanisms through which pre-electoral coalition signals shape voting behavior. According to these, coalition signals both shift the perceived ideological positions of parties and prime coalition considerations at the cost of party considerations. The work at hand is the first to test another possibility of how coalition signals affect voting. This coalition expectation mechanism claims that coalition signals affect voting decisions by changing voters' expectations about which coalitions are likely to form after the election. Moreover, this paper provides the first integrative overview of all three mechanisms that link coalition signals and individual voting behavior. Results from a survey experiment conducted during Sweden's 2018 general election suggest that the coalition expectation mechanism can indeed be at work. By showing how parties' pre-electoral coalition behavior enter a voter's decision calculus, the paper provides important insights for the literature on strategic voting theories in proportional systems

Come hither or go away? Recognising pre-electoral coalition signals in the news

In this paper, we introduce the task of political coalition signal prediction from text, that is, the task of recognizing from the news coverage leading up to an election the(un)willingness of political parties to form a government coalition. We decompose our problem into two related, but distinct tasks: (i) predicting whether a reported statement from a politician or a journalist refers to a potential coalition and (ii) predicting the polarity of the signal — namely, whether the speaker is in favour of or against the coalition. For this, we explore the benefits of multi-task learning and investigate which setup and task formulation is best suited for each subtask. We evaluate our approach, based on hand-coded newspaper articles, covering elections in three countries (Ireland, Germany, Austria) and two languages (English, German). Our results show that the multi-task learning approach can further improve results over a strong monolingual transfer learning baseline

Observing Many Researchers Using the Same Data and Hypothesis Reveals a Hidden Universe of Uncertainty

Breznau N, Rinke EM, Wuttke A, et al. Observing Many Researchers Using the Same Data and Hypothesis Reveals a Hidden Universe of Uncertainty. 2021.This study explores how researchers’ analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to include conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis and that may lead to diverging results. We coordinated 161 researchers in 73 research teams and observed their research decisions as they used the same data to independently test the same prominent social science hypothesis: that greater immigration reduces support for social policies among the public. In this typical case of research based on secondary data, we find that research teams reported widely diverging numerical findings and substantive conclusions despite identical start conditions. Researchers’ expertise, prior beliefs, and expectations barely predicted the wide variation in research outcomes. More than 90% of the total variance in numerical results remained unexplained even after accounting for research decisions identified via qualitative coding of each team’s workflow. This reveals a universe of uncertainty that is hidden when considering a single study in isolation. The idiosyncratic nature of how researchers’ results and conclusions varied is a new explanation for why many scientific hypotheses remain contested. It calls for greater humility and clarity in reporting scientific findings

Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty

This study explores how researchers' analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in 73 research teams and observed their research decisions as they used the same data to independently test the same prominent social science hypothesis: that greater immigration reduces support for social policies among the public. In this typical case of social science research, research teams reported both widely diverging numerical findings and substantive conclusions despite identical start conditions. Researchers' expertise, prior beliefs, and expectations barely predict the wide variation in research outcomes. More than 95% of the total variance in numerical results remains unexplained even after qualitative coding of all identifiable decisions in each team's workflow. This reveals a universe of uncertainty that remains hidden when considering a single study in isolation. The idiosyncratic nature of how researchers' results and conclusions varied is a previously underappreciated explanation for why many scientific hypotheses remain contested. These results call for greater epistemic humility and clarity in reporting scientific findings