Modeling the formation of attentive publics in social media: the case of Donald Trump

Previous research has shown the importance of Donald Trump’s Twitter activity, and that of his Twitter following, in spreading his message during the primary and general election campaigns of 2015–2016. However, we know little about how the publics who followed Trump and amplified his messages took shape. We take this case as an opportunity to theorize and test questions about the assembly of what we call “attentive publics” in social media. We situate our study in the context of current discussions of audience formation, attention flow, and hybridity in the United States’ political media system. From this we derive propositions concerning how attentive publics aggregate around a particular object, in this case Trump himself, which we test using time series modeling. We also present an exploration of the possible role of automated accounts in these processes. Our results reiterate the media hybridity described by others, while emphasizing the importance of news media coverage in building social media attentive publics.Accepted manuscrip

Trump, Twitter, and news media responsiveness: a media systems approach

How populists engage with media of various types, and are treated by those media, are questions of international interest. In the United States, Donald Trump stands out for both his populism-inflected campaign style and his success at attracting media attention. This article examines how interactions between candidate communications, social media, partisan media, and news media combined to shape attention to Trump, Clinton, Cruz, and Sanders during the 2015–2016 American presidential primary elections. We identify six major components of the American media system and measure candidates’ efforts to gain attention from them. Our results demonstrate that social media activity, in the form of retweets of candidate posts, provided a significant boost to news media coverage of Trump, but no comparable boost for other candidates. Furthermore, Trump tweeted more at times when he had recently garnered less of a relative advantage in news attention, suggesting he strategically used Twitter to trigger coverage.Accepted manuscrip

The temporal turn in communication research: time series analyses sing computational approaches

Some of the most pioneering work in our field is occurring where emerging computational approaches are meeting time series analytic techniques. Combining these methods is helping scholars improve our understanding of phenomena as varied as news and issue attention cycles, physiological responses to communication exposure, changes in mass opinion, and the dynamics between social media and legacy news media. In this article, we summarize the current state of computational communication science techniques to generate sequential data for use in time series analysis and suggest directions for further development. In particular, we consider the long-standing place of temporal dynamics for our field’s main theories; overview recent work combining computational science with time series analysis; present narrative accounts of two major research programs in this area; and review techniques of time series analysis, including major concerns for communication researchers working in the area.Published versio

Do democracy clauses matter? : the effects of regional integration associations on political stability and democratic consolidation

This paper examines the mechanisms by which democracy clauses promote democracy and domestic political stability. It begins by noting that political instability in one country can have a negative spillover and impede the economic success of regional integration. Domestic political instability may also hinder cooperation among member states. Thus, domestic political stability is a collective good for regional integration organization (RIO) member states. Legalizing democratic conditionality helps member states to overcome collective action problems and equips RIOs with the necessary credibility, justification, and tools for intervention in member states’ domestic political affairs. In addition, RIOs deepen economic integration among member states, which in turn raises the stakes for the member states to collectively defend democratic institutions and inflates the costs of sanctions for countries under threat. We test the main arguments using data gathered for 40 RIOs in the world. The econometric analyses of RIO coup rates and democratic backsliding rates demonstrate that democracy clauses are indeed effective in preventing coups and backsliding within countries that are members of RIOs with such clauses. Moreover, an analysis of democratic gains indicates that democracy clauses are also effective in the promotion of democracy within RIO member states