Award won:

• Paul Lazarsfeld Best Paper Award

Name(s) & affiliation:

• Jasmine English, Assistant Professor, Reed College

Project title:

• Carceral Political Discussion

Publication reference:

• English, Jasmine. 2025. Carceral Political Discussion. Working paper.

Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research

• This project began from a simple question: what counts as “political talk” and for whom? Most measures of political discussion capture only the liberal-democratic “first face” of the state (elections, parties, institutions). But for many Americans, especially Black Americans, the most immediate and consequential face of the state is the carceral one: police, courts, correctional systems. I wanted to understand whether everyday conversations about policing and criminal justice function politically even though they fall outside conventional survey items. The project grew out of a broader interest in how racial power structures shape the lived experience of citizenship and what we count as participation.

Summarize the main takeaway of your project.

• Black Americans discuss policing and the criminal justice system more than white Americans — reversing the conventional discussion gap — and these conversations have distinct consequences for efficacy, identity, and engagement.

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

• The project tries to reconceptualize what counts as political discussion and examine how citizens communicate about different faces of the state. By combining survey methods with “analytic listening” to real-world conversations from the Fora platform, the project demonstrates that what we talk about and the political implications of that talk vary significantly by the domain of politics under discussion. In so doing, the project expands the boundaries of political communication research beyond traditional electoral-representative topics.

What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? (What was the most challenging part of this project? …& how did you overcome those challenges?)

• The most challenging aspect was developing a valid measure of carceral discussion content. Rather than assuming which topics matter, I used grounded theory and “analytic listening” to inductively identify discussion topics from 44 real-world conversations on the Fora platform. This involved multiple rounds of qualitative coding to develop a battery of positive and negative carceral discussion topics. If I were to start again, I might expand the initial listening phase to include more diverse conversation settings and explore additional carceral domains like immigration enforcement earlier in the process.

What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?

• There is growing interest in bringing the carceral state into the study of political behavior and communication, but much of the field still defaults to liberal-democratic institutions as the anchor of “politics.” I would love to see more work that treats the state as multifaced and coercive, and that foregrounds how marginalized groups learn about politics through policing, punishment, and surveillance. Methodologically, I also hope to see more efforts to use listening and ethnography not only to illustrate but to build survey instruments.

What’s next? (Follow-up projects? Completely new direction?)

• My next step is to extend the analysis to immigration enforcement and child protective services, two institutions that similarly blur the line between “public policy” and surveillance. More broadly, I see this as part of an effort to reconceptualize participation from the standpoint of those who experience the state primarily as regulation and threat rather than as representation.

From left to right: Alessandro Nai, Chiara Valli, Jürgen Maier and Loes Aaldering

Award won:

• Walter Lippmann Best Article of the Year in the field of political communication (2025)

Name(s) & affiliation:

• Alessandro Nai, University of Amsterdam
• Chiara Valli, University of Bern
• Jürgen Maier, RPTU
• Loes Aaldering, Free University Amsterdam

Project title:

• Gendered Backlash Depends on the Context: Reassessing Negative Campaigning Sanctions Against Female Candidates via Large-Scale Comparative Data

Publication reference, link (APA 7th):

• Nai, A., Valli, C., Maier, J., & Aaldering, L. (2025). Gendered Backlash Depends on the Context. Reassessing Negative Campaigning Sanctions Against Female Candidates via Large-Scale Comparative Data. Political Communication, 42(3), 454-475.
• https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10584609.2024.2434930

Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research

• This piece was the result of intense collaboration, and friendship, that we have developed over the years. One way or another the four of us have all worked on attack politics, both using experiments and via large-scale data to disentangle “universal” from context-related dynamics. But we have also been a bit frustrated about some results in the literature (including in some of our previous research) regarding the role of gender in attack politics – specifically, the lack of results where, on paper, there should have been plenty. And decided to dive into it.

Summarize the main takeaway of your project.

• The starting point is rather straightforward: everything we know about the dynamics of gender in politics, and the structuring role of gender stereotypes against women in politics, specifically, suggests that women should be more punished than men when they go negative on their rivals. Yet, the literature only shows little and scattered evidence that this is the case. How could this be? Our intuition is that perhaps we have not been looking at the right place. If gender stereotypes matter, then their effect should be higher in contexts (i.e., countries) where cultural norms are more unfavourable towards women – contexts, in other words, where gender equality is less pronounced. We leveraged a large dataset that covers more than 700 candidates having competed in elections across almost 100 countries worldwide, and that is exactly what we found: the penalty against women for going negative is much more severe in countries with low gender equality.

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

• While intrinsically this is a project about the role of gender (stereotypes) in politics, what we focus on is the ways in which “going negative” – that is, attacking political opponents during election campaigns – backlashes for those who engage in it.

What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? (What was the most challenging part of this project? …& how did you overcome those challenges?)

• We have long considered adding an experimental component to it, to show mechanisms (e.g., the intervening role of stereotypes). We even had in our hands some data in this sense, that we had collected for a different project. But we never really managed to make the large-scale observational and the experimental components “click” together. One reason, of course, is that our main claim is comparative – that women face a higher backlash in less egalitarian contexts. So a one-shot experiment (in our case, we had access to data from the USA) was not really ideal. We decided to drop the experiment, and only focused on the large-scale observational data. Abd that worked quite well.

What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?

• Replications! Our data is quite awesome (I am not really objective, here, even if it is), but no data is perfect. In our case, one of its limitations, that we discuss at nauseam but that remains a concern, is that the data comes from expert judgments.  On the plus side, this allows to have a really large-scale dataset, that adopts a holistic understanding of the election campaign (vs., e.g., “only” looking at what candidates say on social media). On the downside, experts can be biased. So, our results need to be replicated with other data. Really, get in touch with us if you have such data. On top of this, we still itch to show that the effects resit a controlled environment and are “causal” (yes, I know, I know). We really want to do an experiment that allows us to test for this differential effect of the context. So perhaps a large-scale comparative experiment? That would be great but is not cheap. Reach out if you could envision a collaborative study in this sense.

What’s next? (Follow-up projects? Completely new direction?)

• We all work on slightly different things, while coming together often to do some joint work (on negativity, notably). But here are some cool stuff that we have been busy with on our separate side recently

• Alex has been working on the roots of political violence, looking for instance at the role of violent episodes via natural experiments. See for instance: Nai, A., van Erkel, P. F., & Bos, L. (2025). Violence Against Politicians Drives Support for Political Violence Among (Some) Voters: Evidence from a Natural Experiment. Public Opinion Quarterly, nfaf010. https://academic.oup.com/poq/article/89/2/310/8117288

• Chiara has been working on the role of mainstream media in contributing to the spread of conspiracy theories among the public, for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic.  See Adam , S., Rohrbach, T., Keller, F., Makhortykh, M., de L√©on, E., Valli, C., Baghumyan, A., Sydorova (2025). How do media contribute to the dissemination of conspiracy beliefs? A field study combining panel and web tracking at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf033

• Jürgen has recently been working on the mechanisms that can lead to the use of negative campaigning. See for instance: Maier, J., Oschatz, C., Stier, S., Dian, M., & Sältzer, M. (2025). Beyond rationality. Toward a more comprehensive understanding of the use of negative campaigning. European Political Science Review, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755773925000025

• Loes is currently working on a project on sexist campaign attacks (and how women candidates can respond to that – together with Alex!), various projects related to gendered political socialization, and has a continuing interest in gendered political stereotypes, see for instance: Van Der Pas, D., Aaldering, L., & Bos, A. L. (2024). Looks like a leader: Measuring evolution in gendered politician stereotypes. Political Behavior, 46(3), 1653-1675. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-023-09888-5

Award won:

Timothy E. Cook Best Graduate Student Paper Award Committee

Name(s) & affiliation:

• Rex Weiye Deng; Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis

Project title:

• Screened Realities: How Entertainment Fosters Political Compliance in Autocracies

Publication reference:

• Under review

Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research

I am a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis. I primarily study authoritarian politics and political communication, with a regional focus on China.

The motivation for this research grew out of two converging observations. First, about a decade ago I noticed a striking revival of anti-corruption TV dramas and documentaries in China—programs that exposed official misconduct yet were produced and promoted by the state itself. As these shows became immensely popular and spurred public discussion rather than suppression, I found myself asking: why would an authoritarian regime allow seemingly self-critical entertainment, and how might it use that content to shape citizens’ beliefs?

Second, recent scholarship in the U.S. has shown that entertainment (rather than news) can influence political attitudes, beliefs about mobility and fairness, and even public policy preferences. That research made me realise that entertainment is far more than “just fun” media—it’s a form of political communication, ripe for analysis across regimes. Together, these strands motivated me to explore how entertainment—its production, narrative, and dissemination—becomes a tool of political influence, especially in non-democratic systems.

Summarize the main takeaway of your project.

• My project shows how China’s regime uses “problem-revealing entertainment” in the past decade—TV dramas and documentaries that expose corruption but highlight reform—to boost perceptions of government competence and accountability.

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

• This project is a political communication study because it examines how media narratives (and more specifically, entertainment) shape citizens’ political perceptions. The focuses of this study, including persuasion, framing, and media effects, are at the heart of the field. Like other influential research on soft news, infotainment, and narrative persuasion in American politics, it explores how entertainment can influence political attitudes by embedding messages in engaging stories.

Extending these insights to an authoritarian context, the project shows how the Chinese regime uses “problem-revealing entertainment”—TV dramas and documentaries that dramatize corruption but highlight reform—to improve perceptions of competence and accountability. By combining theories of narrative persuasion with empirical tests of attitude change, it demonstrates even under settings of strong authoritarian control,  narrative-based communication operates through familiar mechanisms of realism and immersion, which are central to political communication research.

What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? (What was the most challenging part of this project? …& how did you overcome those challenges?)

• Two big things. First, social desirability bias. Measuring regime evaluations is sensitive, so next time I’d build a list experiment into the primary outcomes (alongside the Word Association Test I used and the “bury-in-filler” item ordering) to further reduce demand effects. The challenge was getting honest attitudes in an authoritarian context; I mitigated it with WAT, dispersed political items, and a placebo drama arm, but a list experiment would strengthen inference about true beliefs.

Second, a tighter test of the mechanism. I’d add an alternative, apolitical control (e.g., a nature or sports recap matched on length/production value) to cleanly separate “narrative immersion” from “political content.” If budget allows, I’d also use a two-stage design that independently varies (a) realism/negativity (systemic-corruption vs isolated-case edits) and (b) immersion (coherent recap vs disrupted/segment order), with preregistered checks for perceived realism, engagement, and counter-arguing. This would more rigorously test whether problem-revealing entertainment → immersion → persuasion drives the effects beyond any generic entertainment exposure.

What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?

• Recent work by Eunji Kim has revitalized the study of entertainment and political communication in democratic contexts. Her AJPS article “Entertaining Beliefs in Economic Mobility” (2023) and her forthcoming book The American Mirage (Princeton University Press, 2025) show how reality TV and entertainment media reinforce the myth of meritocracy and shape citizens’ beliefs about inequality and mobility. Together with Kim and Patterson (2024, APSR), these studies highlight how non-news entertainment can subtly sustain political worldviews, echoing classic soft-news research by Baum (2002) but using new psychological and experimental tools.

Building on this wave, future research could go beyond audience effects to analyze the supply side of entertainment—how political contexts shape what gets produced, who produces it, and under what constraints. As I argue in this project, examining how regimes (or even democracies) co-opt cultural elites, navigate institutional boundaries, and embed ideology in narratives would open the “black box” of media control and cultural production. This supply-side lens, which are largely understudied in the political communication literature, could connect comparative authoritarian research with American political communication by linking production incentives and media market dynamics to the downstream formation of attitudes and behaviors. Also, more research should examine how different forms of entertainment—dramas, documentaries, variety shows, or online streaming content—affect political attitudes and behaviors across diverse contexts.

What’s next? (Follow-up projects? Completely new direction?)

• My follow-up projects build on this study by further examining the political consequences of entertainment in authoritarian contexts. One ongoing project investigates how historical dramas that glorify emperors’ lives and achievements shape individuals’ contemporary support for strongman rule. Beyond authoritarian settings, I am also expanding this research agenda to explore how entertainment narratives can be harnessed to address pressing social and political challenges, such as reducing political misperceptions and fostering more informed public engagement.