Award won:

• The 2024 Kaid-Sanders Best Article of the Year Award, Political Communication Division. ICA.

Name(s) & affiliation:

• Sang Jung Kim (Assistant Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Iowa),
• Isabel Villanueva (Doctoral Candidate, Life Sciences Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison),
• Kaiping Chen (Associate Professor, Life Sciences Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Project title:

• Going beyond affective polarization: How emotions and identities are used in anti-vaccination TikTok videos

Co-authors (if any):

• Isabel Villanueva (Doctoral Candidate, Life Sciences Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison), Kaiping Chen (Assistant Professor, Life Sciences Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Publication reference, link (APA 7th):

• Kim, S. J., Villanueva, I. I., & Chen, K. (2024). Going beyond affective polarization: How emotions and identities are used in anti-vaccination TikTok videos. Political Communication, 41(4), 588-607.

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

• Our team shares a strong interest in investigating how the multi-modal delivery of political communication shapes audience engagement. This interest was sparked by the widespread misinformation about COVID-19 vaccination on social media, a central issue during the pandemic. These messages, often characterized by their multi-modal and emotional nature, frequently emphasized particular sociopolitical identities, which appeared to amplify their impact on the public. Despite this, there has been a lack of sufficient empirical investigations into these dynamics. Recognizing this gap, we were motivated to focus our research on understanding the mechanisms of such communication and its broader implications for political communication. Notably, our team highlights how emotions influence engagement differently depending on the distinct modalities of delivery and emphasizes the role of various social identities beyond partisanship, such as relational identities that highlight roles like being a mother.

In 280 characters or less, summarize the main takeaway of your project.

• Our study expands the emotions-as-frames model, affective intelligence theory, and social identity theory by revealing how audiences engage with emotional appeals and sociopolitical identity narratives delivered through multi-modal TikTok anti-vaccination videos.

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

• Emotions and social identities are foundational concepts in political communication, grounded in a rich historical tradition. However, the interplay between the multi-modal nature of social media messages and the emotions and social identities embedded in political communication remains underexplored. Our paper positions itself as a novel ‘polcomm project’ by addressing this gap and advancing foundational research in the field.

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 of this project was identifying distinct emotions across the various modalities in TikTok anti-vaccination videos. In this paper, we utilized an off-the-shelf library based on the traditional machine learning model and a dictionary-based approach to identify emotional appeals. Moving forward, our team is enhancing this process by leveraging foundation models—large-scale, pre-trained models that provide a versatile framework, enabling them to be adapted for a wide range of tasks across different domains—to improve the accuracy and depth of emotion detection. We are particularly excited to explore how foundation models can advance the identification of emotional appeals in multi-modal messages.

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

• An exciting and rapidly growing area of research utilizes various computer-assisted methods, including computer vision models, to explore theoretical concepts in political communication by examining large-scale, multi-modalmessages, such as emotional expressions. Furthermore, as the social media environment matures, scholars are increasingly focusing on its multi-platform nature and how political communication flows from one platform to another. In the future, we hope to see more research efforts integrating multi-modal and multi-platform analyses, examining how different types of media—such as text, images, and videos—interact across platforms to shape political narratives and influence public opinion.
• For instance, our recent study (Chen et al., 2024) investigates the portrayal of gender stereotypes on YouTube and TikTok within controversial science discourses. Our analysis reveals that while both platforms associate distinct multi-modal features with men and women, they diverge significantly in thematic emphasis: YouTube’s thumbnails frequently feature climate activists or women depicted in harmony with nature, while TikTok’s thumbnails often highlight women in Vlog-style selfies with feminine gestures. These findings underscore the nuanced role that platform-specific affordances and audience preferences play in shaping gendered narratives.
• In light of these insights, we urge political communication scholars to prioritize understanding how multi-modal and multi-platform messages interact to construct and propagate political communication phenomena. Adopting this comparative and holistic approach is critical for uncovering the complexities of digital political discourse and its implications for public opinion and engagement.

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

• Building on our team’s focus on advancing computational methods to analyze multi-modal messages and uncover political communication phenomena, we are currently developing a sociotechnical framework for evaluating computer vision models and introducing new approaches to assess biases in the classification of gender and emotions within images in these models, including foundation models (Sha et al., 2024). Simultaneously, as mentioned earlier, we are continuing our efforts to understand how political communication reveals differences in multi-modal messages across various social media platforms, integrating multi-modal and multi-platform approaches to advance political communication scholarship. Looking ahead, we aim to collaborate across disciplines to develop metrics that enhance the transparency and fairness of computer vision models. By doing so, we hope to bridge the gap between computational advancements and their real-world applications in understanding and improving political communication across diverse platforms.

Award won:

• IJPP Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award, 2024

Name(s) & affiliation:

• Erin Baggott Carter, University of Southern California and Hoover Institution, Stanford University
• Brett L. Carter, University of Southern California and Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Publication reference:

• Propaganda in Autocracies: Institutions, Information, and the Politics of Belief. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2023.

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

• The project has its origins in a series of conversations in 2015, when we realized just how profoundly different propaganda in China and Congo look to readers. We quickly realized no one had ever attempted to measure propaganda cross-nationally and there was no real explanation for why propaganda might differ so dramatically across countries. We set out to identify and collect as many state-run newspapers as possible, and we then used sentiment dictionaries to measure the valence of content surrounding government references. It all moved very quickly; it was extraordinarily exciting.

Summarize the main takeaway of your project.

• The propaganda strategy an autocrat employs depends on the electoral constraints he confronts.
• Where these electoral constraints are relatively binding, autocrats must curry some amount of popular support, and so they employ propaganda to persuade citizens of regime merits. To be persuasive, however, propaganda apparatuses must cultivate the appearance of neutrality, which requires conceding bad news and policy failures. Where electoral constraints are binding, we find, propaganda apparatuses cover the regime much like Fox News covers Republicans.
• Where autocrats confront no electoral constraints – where autocrats can fully secure themselves with repression – propaganda serves not to persuade citizens but to dominate them. Propaganda derives its power from absurdity. By forcing citizens to consume content that everyone knows to be false, autocrats make their capacity for repression common knowledge. Propaganda apparatuses engage in effusive pro-regime coverage while pretending opposition does not exist. Narratives about a country’s contemporary history are presented in absurd terms, since these absurdities give them power. Citizens are told that their countries are envied around the world, that “democracy” is alive and vibrant, and that the dictator is a champion of national sports. Propaganda apparatuses routinely and explicitly threaten citizens with repression.

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

• This book draws on the first global dataset of autocratic propaganda, encompassing over 8 million newspaper articles from fifty-nine countries in six languages. We document dramatic variation in propaganda across autocracies: in coverage of the regime and the opposition, in narratives about domestic and international life, in the threats of violence issued to citizens, and in the domestic events that shape it. We also show that propaganda discourages popular protests.

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?)

• Not sure we would do anything differently. We’re delighted with how the project turned out and are equally humbled and gratified with the reception. The most challenging part of the project was how sprawling it quickly became, given how rich our data was and how little prior work had sought to measure propaganda cross-nationally. Not sure we ever overcame that particular challenge, which is why the book is so long!

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

• The interest in propaganda has obviously boomed since we started the project in 2015, due to lots of things: the rise of computational social science, more sophisticated survey methods, and changes in the nature of dictatorship itself. The most fruitful direction, we think, is work that combines these three things: that uses cutting-edge tools to measure propaganda, takes seriously how citizens across the world respond to it, and works within a unified theoretical framework. There is lots of work that does one or two of those well, but much less that does all three. This sort of approach will also provide a foundation for understanding variation in propaganda – and responses to it – across time and space.

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

• We’ve returned to the book projects that were consuming us before we undertook Propaganda in Autocracies. Erin is working on a book about the US-China bilateral relationship. Brett is working on a book about autocratic politics in post-Cold War Africa. We’re in the early phases of a new, joint book project as well, about dissent and repression in China, which builds on some of our earlier research.

Award won:

• The International Journal of Press/Politics Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award, 2023

Name(s) & affiliation:

• Gadi Wolfsfeld, Reichman University
• Tamir Sheafer, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Scott Althaus, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Project title:

• Building Theory in Political Communication: The Politics-Media-Politics Approach. N.Y.: Oxford University Press.

Publication reference:

• Building Theory in Political Communication: The Politics-Media-Politics Approach. N.Y.: Oxford University Press.

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

• The book project started in 2013 when Tamir and Gadi drafted a coauthored paper for the American Political Science Association conference that proposed using the PMP approach as an organizing principle to help scholars adopt a more comprehensive approach to thinking about political communication. An extended email conversation about that paper with Scott resulted in a rough outline for a coauthored book that was shared among the three of us in October 2013. What got all three of us excited about writing this book was the pressing need in political communication, then as now, to cumulate research insights across specialty literatures, countries, and time periods so that as a field we could develop better theory that leads to more rigorous hypothesis testing. The resulting book is a step in that direction.

In 280 characters or less, summarize the main takeaway of your project.

• Building Theory in Political Communication presents the first generalizable conceptual framework for political communication that is also falsifiable, explaining how media performance contributes to successful political performance across nations, regime types and information systems. The book adapts, refines, and extends the Politics-Media-Politics (PMP) principle, which states that variations in political ecosystems have a major impact on media systems, values, practices, and resources, which can then have dependent, independent, and conditional effects on political processes. With an emphasis on international comparative studies encompassing diverse political systems, the book’s theoretical argument moves beyond the field’s Western focus to show that PMP is useful in a wide range of contexts and research literatures.

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

• The times are good for political communication research, and yet the field is also straining under the weight of its own successes. Against the ever-growing variety and scale of empirical studies, the theoretical moorings of political communication research are increasingly overextended and underexamined. The opportunities to conduct innovative research on a wide range of political communication phenomena using diverse and nuanced data sources have never been more promising, and yet our ability to synthesize insights across research literature and make collective sense of what we are finding has never been more wanting.
• We see three tensions within political communication research that exacerbate theoretical disorientation. First, although media independence from political power is widely seen as important, it remains hazily conceived, is rarely tested, and is itself a major factor in degrading effective communication between citizens and governments. Second, most of the places our field has studied for empirical insights are WEIRD: western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. But most of the world is not. So while we know (or think we know) a great deal about how political communication works in the advanced democracies of Western Europe and North America, we know far less about how any of this applies to anywhere else in the world. Third, the field of political communication has aspired for decades to accumulate empirical insights relevant for the practice of democracy without quite managing ever to get around to building theory. At least, not the kind of theory that could potentially be falsified. Instead, we are good at building interpretive frameworks that pose as theories. These frameworks are necessary steps in theory construction, and there is no shame in building them. But they are intermediary steps. To realize their potential, they must then give birth to claims taking the form of predictions – claims that can be tested and potentially falsified by others. This is basic science. But instead of going the next step to generate falsifiable hypotheses, our field’s interpretive frameworks have tended to bloat outward to absorb any exceptions and anomalies that fail to confirm to initial intuitions.
• Gaining momentum against these problems requires a few elements that this book aims to supply. First, we need common points of conceptual reference to better align disparate literatures in ways that cumulate, integrate, and synthesize knowledge across specialty areas. Second, we need a clear focus on the larger systems and dynamic processes in which specific political communication phenomena are situated, so we can better see the connections between seemingly unrelated topics. Third, we need clearly defined evaluative criteria for assessing the performance of media and political activity to replace familiar expressions of knowing disappointment when media systems fail to live up to vaunted expectations. Fourth, we need these evaluative criteria to be useful across regime types (not just advanced democracies of the northern hemisphere). Fifth, we need new theoretical vistas for understanding systems of political communication that can move the field past interpretive frameworks and toward development of testable hypotheses. This book aims to start a larger conversation that will gradually supply these needed elements. We sketch a generalizable conceptual map which should have broad utility across multiple subfields, which provides some guidelines for moving beyond WEIRD cases, is agnostic to communication technologies, is capable of stimulating development of testable hypotheses, and holds potential for enduring value to the field.
• The book’s chapters aim to illustrate this concept map’s basic components, demonstrate how to apply it, and showcase its usefulness. The ultimate goal of this volume is to contribute to the joint effort for building cumulative knowledge in the field of political communication. We do so by adapting, refining, and extending Gadi’s Politics Media Politics (PMP) principle. We think of the PMP approach as an intentionally broad conceptual map that we hope will be adopted and adapted by other researchers working in the field. The book’s chapters aim to illustrate this concept map’s basic components, demonstrate how to apply it, and showcase its usefulness. Taken together, the book’s chapters serve to provide:
• A general conceptual framework for synthesizing and integrating research findings across disparate strands of the political communication literature;
• That can be applied cross-nationally and over time;
• To assess how media performance might usefully contribute to successful political performance;
• Across a wide range of regime types and information systems;
• With the purpose of cumulating knowledge across diverse and specialized research communities;
• To increase the efficiency, relevance, and practical importance of scholarly research on the practices of political communication around the world.

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 wish we had been able to finish it in less time! The most challenging part of the project was coordinating things remotely since the three of us weren’t all in the same place. Even though we could organize Zoom meetings and send chapter drafts over email, nothing replaced the importance of “face to face” meetings in developing the theoretical concept map that the book presents. So we took every advantage to meet in person at academic conferences and workshops, and eventually we were able to complete the book. The second most challenging part was developing the language for a conceptual framework that could stand outside particular places and times and communication technologies. We wanted the book’s concept map to be used by political communication scholars anywhere in the world, looking at different aspects of communication ecosystems, across different types of political regimes, and at different points in history. We think we have accomplished this, but it took us a long time to work through alternative concepts and labels before we became convinced that the resulting elements presented in the book had the potential to meet this lofty ambition. We accomplished this by taking time to not rush things prematurely. So in the end, our second most challenging problem was solved by the first most challenging problem, because our delays in moving the book forward gave us plenty of time to refine and revisit our framework until we felt very confident in its utility.

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

• Given the complexity of contemporary communication ecosystems, it is far easier today for scholars to do good empirical work than to do good theoretical work, and to focus on narrow superspecialty problems rather than to make our research relevant and understandable to people who aren’t already familiar with the narrow research questions that we’re individually pursuing. We hope that our book will lead more researchers to adapt the PMP approach to their own research, so that we can collectively advance the quality of both empirical and theoretical contributions within the field.

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

• Because we’ve been thinking about the PMP approach for a lot longer than any of our readers, we’re brimming with ideas about how to apply it to more cases studies and countries. All three of us will probably be adapting it in different ways to our respective areas of research specialization, but we hope that the immediate next step is something much bigger than the three of us will be producing on our own. Our larger aim with the book is to help political communication scholars build globally-relevant theory together. We hope the book sparks a larger scholarly conversation about how to build theory in political communication that overcomes the problems we’ve identified in ways that can move our field onto firmer theoretical (and empirical) ground. This would be the most satisfying follow-up project that we can think of.