PCR Awardee Questionnaire: Timothy E. Cook Best Graduate Student Paper Award (2022)

Name(s) & affiliation:

• Nina Obermeier, University of Pennsylvania

Project title:

• Right-Wing Populism and the Rise of Internationalism in Europe

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

• I am currently an ISCAP Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Later this year, I will join the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor). I completed my PhD at Cornell University in 2022.
  This research was part of my dissertation project. In working on this project, I was motivated by concerns about the rise of the populist radical right – especially in Western Europe – and by the idea that this reflected a popular backlash against globalization. When I started looking at trends in public opinion data from countries in which the populist radical right was ascendant, I was surprised by the fact that, in each of them, public opinion was in fact becoming more positive toward immigration, the European Union (EU), and globalization. That puzzling observation launched the entire project.

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

• Why is public opinion becoming more internationalist at a time when the anti-internationalist populist radical right is surging? The populist radical right makes anti-internationalism part of its extremist brand, turning those who reject extremism into internationalists.

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

• Fundamentally, this is a project about how both party communication strategies and media coverage shape public opinion. I make extensive use of media data to test my argument, primarily by using supervised machine learning on European newspaper articles to construct measures of the extent to which Euroskepticism is linked to right-wing extremism in media discourse.

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 project improved tremendously once I began engaging more seriously with the many different subfields and disciplines that are relevant to the project. I was able to draw important insights from fields such as American politics, comparative politics, international political economy, sociology, social psychology, and, of course, political communication, which strengthened the project immeasurably.

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

• What one might call the “second wave” of studies on the backlash against globalization is producing exciting new research that lies at the intersection of several different fields of study. Researchers are looking more closely at the role of gender, race, technology, political elites and advertising, and climate change, while at the same time expanding the scope of these studies to look beyond Western democracies.
  I look forward to seeing even more interdisciplinary work in this field, making the boundaries between subfields and disciplines more porous, and allowing for richer cross-fertilization of ideas.

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

• I am currently preparing the paper for publication as well as developing a book manuscript that explores the theme of anti-internationalism as extremism in greater detail. I am also working on two follow-up projects. The first investigates how the linking of anti-internationalism with right-wing extremism has helped close the gender gap in support for globalization, while the second explores how the rise of the populist radical right shapes attitudes toward internationalism among individuals with a migrant background.

PCR Awardee Questionnaire: Thomas E. Patterson Best Dissertation Award (2022)

Name(s) & affiliation:

• Ine Goovaerts (University of Antwerp, Belgium)

Project title:

• Destructive or Deliberative? An Investigation of the Evolution, Determinants, and Effects of the Quality of Political Debate

Publication reference, link (APA 7th):

• Goovaerts, I. (2021). Destructive or Deliberative? An investigation of the Evolution, Determinants, and Effects of the Quality of Political Debate. PhD Dissertation. Leuven: KU Leuven. https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/633111

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

• I have always been passionate about the interplay between communication and politics. After graduating in communication sciences, I pursued an additional master in political sciences, and decided to write a master thesis that combined both fields. I studied whether the effects of political personalization in the news play out differently for male versus female politicians, and so it began… my interest in doing research in the pol comm field got sparked a lot! Not really knowing back then what doing a PhD precisely entails, I was lucky that in that moment, my supervisors told me about a PhD position that opened in the research group of my supervisor Sofie Marien. And so I applied and got hired! During that time, events like Brexit and the Trump election led to many concerns about today’s quality of the political debate. Wanting to understand this better, my PhD journey led to writing a dissertation about the evolution (1985-2019), determinants and effects of politicians’ use of rude and simplistic statements in the western European context of mediated political debates.

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

• Contrary to many concerns, politicians’ use of uncivil and simplistic statements did not systematically increase over time, at least not in televised debates. Rather, its use is highly context-dependent, and when politicians turn to it, they do not win much: they are generally trusted less and not perceived as more convincing.

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

• The combination and connection of different literatures from political sciences, communication sciences, and political communication (e.g. incivility literature, deliberative democratic theory, populism literature, etc.), as well as the research focus itself on politicians’ communication styles in mediated communication outlets (e.g. election debates).

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?)

• One of the challenges I bumped into was to keep the overview of the many different studies and literatures that my PhD topic and studies connected to. After some time, I figured that I had to find some ways to deal with this. One such thing that helped me was creating a OneNote file that I structured into themes and sub-themes, to keep an overview of the different literatures/studies I was reading. So, if I would start a PhD again, I would think earlier on about tools that could help me to deal with feelings of literature overload.

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

• So many important things to do/keep on doing! If I would have to name one research topic, I believe it is important that the field continues studying individual and societal-level causes and consequences of hate speech and violent rhetoric in different (online and offline) contexts and settings. This is not only important from a scientific point of view, but also from a societal point of view. The research findings could feed into societal debate and societally relevant tools or applications that can deal with or lower the use of hateful or violent rhetoric in the public and political sphere.

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

• After finalizing my PhD at KU Leuven, I started a post-doc position at the University of Antwerp. In my post-doc, I am working on and involved in an exciting combination of new projects as well as follow-up projects. More specifically, I am a researcher on and a co-coordinator of an inter-university project between different Belgian universities (project: “NOTLIKEUS”). In this project, we study causes and consequences of citizens’ perceptions of differentness towards other-minded people and polarization in society. Moreover, I am also still engaged with studies on (violations of) communication norms in the public and political debate. I am very happy to be involved in these research projects in the next few years, and let’s see later what the further future brings for me!

PCR Awardee Questionnaire: The Kaid-Sanders Best Political Communication Article of the Year Award (2022)

Name(s) & affiliation:

• Jin Woo Kim, Assistant Professor, School of Communication, Kookmin University
• Eunji Kim, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Columbia University

Project title:

• Temporal dynamics of selective exposure

Publication reference, link (APA 7th):

• Kim, J. W., & Kim, E. (2021). Temporal Selective Exposure: How Partisans Choose When to Follow Politics. Political Behavior, 43, 1663–1683. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09690-1

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

• We started this project when we were Ph.D. students at Penn. We noticed a tension in the literature: although echo chambers were blamed for exacerbating political polarization in the US, empirical evidence of selective exposure was mixed at best. Why are people’s beliefs and attitudes so polarized if most people have relatively balanced media diets? Our answer was that previous conceptualizations of selective exposure ignored one important aspect of political news consumption: temporal dynamics. We hypothesized that people can choose when to engage with politics to avoid encountering uncongenial news, and that can increase polarization.

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

• Since people pay more attention when their preferred party is performing well, and less attention when the party is doing poorly, people may receive biased information flows even if they follow central or balanced sources.

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

• Selective exposure is perhaps one of the most widely studied topics in the political communication literature, dating all the way back to classical work from the Columbia School. We added a little twist to this classic concept by focusing on temporal dynamics.

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 thought our intuition was right from the beginning, but we had a hard time finding the right empirical strategy to test our hypothesis. Then Matt Levendusky suggested that we use the 2008 Annenberg survey data to examine how partisans’ news consumption behaviors changed before and after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. So the data was already there. It just took some time (and a great mentor) for us to realize that.

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 has been a growing interest in temporal dynamics in political communication processes. This includes studies that focus on overtime fluctuations in political discourse, news consumption, and opinion formation, among others. We believe this is a step in the right direction, as focusing on temporal dynamics can provide advantages in causal inference and can also lead to interesting theoretical insights.

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

• We started this project thinking temporal selective exposure may be one of the causes of political polarization. Our previous paper demonstrated that people indeed engage in temporal selective exposure, but it did not provide evidence of its role in amplifying political polarization. To address this gap, we are planning to conduct experiments to test the effect of temporal selective exposure on polarization.