Working Papers
Under Review
With Hanna Bäck and Andrej Kokkonen
Affective polarization is increasing in many parts of the world, and scholars have shown increasing interest in understanding why this is. Recently it has been suggested that female political representatives may mitigate mass-level affective polarization. It has been proposed that female representatives use a more "communal" leadership style and less aggressive rhetoric, which may reduce affective polarization in the electorate, but this idea has not been systematically tested. In this paper we aim to fill in this gap by studying how politicians talk about each other on social media in 23 western countries. Using a dataset of over 10 million tweets and a combination of dictionary and multilingual language models, we find that male politicians are more likely to attack political opponents representing "outgroups", and that male representatives receive more outgroup negativity. We propose that a "male hostility spiral" explains this pattern, where politicians attack each other online for retribution – creating a negative spiral where hostility sparks hostility.
Reppin’ your Constituency? Geographical Representation in Swedish Parliamentary Debates
In progress.
Which places do politicians appeal to, and how do they appeal to them? While previous research have emphasized how politicians appeal to different social groups of the population to gain votes, research on geographical appeals is scarce. This study advances this literature developing a new approach for measuring geographical appeals using Named Entity Recognition and Geocoding. Subsequently I apply this methodology to measure geographical appeals in Swedish parliamentary speech over almost five decades. In line with previous literature, I find that politicians are more likely to mention places in regions they represent, and originate from. In addition, I study the words surrounding each mention, to measure which issues are discussed in the context of different regions using semi-supervised LDA Topic Modelling. I argue that politicians make local appeals to display local knowledge, and in line with this argument I find that adapt their topical focus in response to changes in local unemployment and local public opinion. These results improves our understanding of how politicians appeal to their constituencies, and have relevance for the study of representation and group appeals, and show several promising avenues for future research.