Joshua A. Tucker

Tweeting From Left to Right Is Online Political Communication More Than an Echo Chamber

We estimated ideological preferences of 3.8 million Twitter users and, using a data set of nearly 150 million tweets concerning 12 political and nonpolitical issues, explored whether online communication resembles an “echo chamber” (as a result of selective exposure and ideological segregation) or a “national conversation.” We observed that information was exchanged primarily among individuals with similar ideological preferences in the case of political issues (e.g., 2012 presidential election, 2013 government shutdown) but not many other current events (e.g., 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, 2014 Super Bowl). Discussion of the Newtown shootings in 2012 reflected a dynamic process, beginning as a national conversation before transforming into a polarized exchange. With respect to both political and nonpolitical issues, liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in cross-ideological dissemination; this is an important asymmetry with respect to the structure of communication that is consistent with psychological theory and research bearing on ideological differences in epistemic, existential, and relational motivation. Overall, we conclude that previous work may have overestimated the degree of ideological segregation in social-media usage.

Transitional winners and losers: Attitudes toward EU membership in post-communist countries

Joshua A. Tucker is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs, PrincetonUniversity, 322 Bendheim Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544 (jtucker@princeton.edu).Alexander C. Pacek is Associate Professor of Political Science, Texas A&M University,College Station, Texas 77843 (e339ap@polisci.tamu.edu). Adam J. Berinsky is AssistantProfessor of Politics, Princeton University, 41 Corwin Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544(berinsky@princeton.edu).We thank Guy Whitten, Randy Stevenson, Christopher Anderson, Jan Leighley, andBenjamin Radcliff for useful comments and support and Sara De Master and JamesMcGhee for research assistance. We also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers fortheir helpful comments and suggestions. All data analysis was conducted using Stata 6.0and Clarify 1.3. A previous version of this article was presented at the 2001 Annual Con-ference of the Midwest Political Science Association. Authors’ names are listed in reversealphabetical order.

Revisiting Electoral Volatility in Post-Communist Countries: New Data, New Results and New Approaches

This article provides a detailed set of coding rules for disaggregating electoral volatility into two components: volatility caused by new party entry and old party exit, and volatility caused by vote switching across existing parties. After providing an overview of both types of volatility in post-communist countries, the causes of volatility are analysed using a larger dataset than those used in previous studies. The results are startling: most findings based on elections in post-communist countries included in previous studies disappear. Instead, entry and exit volatility is found to be largely a function of long-term economic recovery, and it becomes clear that very little is known about what causes ‘party switching’ volatility. As a robustness test of this latter result, the authors demonstrate that systematic explanations for party-switching volatility in Western Europe can indeed be found.

Disenchanted or Discerning: Voter Turnout in Post-Communist Countries

Voter turnout in post-communist countries has exhibited wildly fluctuating patterns against a backdrop of economic and political volatility. In this article, we consider three explanations for this variation: a “depressing disenchantment” hypothesis that predicts voters are less likely to vote in elections when political and economic conditions are worse; a “motivating disenchantment” hypothesis that predicts voters are more likely to vote in elections when conditions are worse; and a “stakes” based hypothesis that predicts voters are more likely to vote in more important elections. Using an original aggregate-level cross-national time-series data set of 137 presidential and parliamentary elections in 19 post-communist countries, we find much stronger empirical support for the stakes-based approach to explaining variation in voter turnout than we do for either of the disenchantment-based approaches. Our findings offer a theoretically integrated picture of voter participation in the post-communist world, and, more broadly, contribute new insights to the general literature on turnout.

The Critical Periphery in the Growth of Social Protests.

Social media have provided instrumental means of communication in many recent political protests. The efficiency of online networks in disseminating timely information has been praised by many commentators; at the same time, users are often derided as “slacktivists” because of the shallow commitment involved in clicking a forwarding button. Here we consider the role of these peripheral online participants, the immense majority of users who surround the small epicenter of protests, representing layers of diminishing online activity around the committed minority. We analyze three datasets tracking protest communication in different languages and political contexts through the social media platform Twitter and employ a network decomposition technique to examine their hierarchical structure. We provide consistent evidence that peripheral participants are critical in increasing the reach of protest messages and generating online content at levels that are comparable to core participants. Although committed minorities may constitute the heart of protest movements, our results suggest that their success in maximizing the number of online citizens exposed to protest messages depends, at least in part, on activating the critical periphery. Peripheral users are less active on a per capita basis, but their power lies in their numbers: their aggregate contribution to the spread of protest messages is comparable in magnitude to that of core participants. An analysis of two other datasets unrelated to mass protests strengthens our interpretation that core-periphery dynamics are characteristically important in the context of collective action events. Theoretical models of diffusion in social networks would benefit from increased attention to the role of peripheral nodes in the propagation of information and behavior.

Political expression and action on social media: Exploring the relationship between lower- and higher-threshold political activities among Twitter users in Italy

Scholars and commentators have debated whether lower-threshold forms of political engagement on social media should be treated as being conducive to higher-threshold modes of political participation or a diversion from them. Drawing on an original survey of a representative sample of Italians who discussed the 2013 election on Twitter, we demonstrate that the more respondents acquire political information via social media and express themselves politically on these platforms, the more they are likely to contact politicians via e-mail, campaign for parties and candidates using social media, and attend offline events to which they were invited online. These results suggest that lower-threshold forms of political engagement on social media do not distract from higher-threshold activities, but are strongly associated with them.

Which Parties Can Lead Opinion? Experimental Evidence on Partisan Cue Taking in Multiparty Democracies

Political parties not only aggregate the policy preferences of their supporters, but also have the ability to shape those preferences. Experimental evidence demonstrates that, when parties stake out positions on policy issues, partisans become more likely to adopt these positions, whether out of blind loyalty or because they infer that party endorsements signal options consistent with their interests or values. It is equally clear, however, that partisans do not always follow their party’s lead. The authors investigate the impact of three party-level traits on partisan cue taking: longevity, incumbency, and ideological clarity. As parties age, voters may become more certain of both the party’s reputation and their own allegiance. Governing parties must take action and respond to events, increasing the likelihood of compromise and failure, and therefore may dilute their reputation and disappoint followers. Incumbency aside, some parties exhibit greater ambiguity in their ideological position than other parties, undermining voter certainty about the meaning of cues. The authors test these hypotheses with experiments conducted in three multiparty democracies (Poland, Hungary, and Great Britain). They find that partisans more strongly follow their party’s lead when that party is older, in the opposition, or has developed a more consistent ideological image. However, the impact of longevity vanishes when the other factors are taken into account. Underscoring the importance of voter (un)certainty, ideologically coherent opposition parties have the greatest capacity to shape the policy views of followers.

Pocketbook vs. Sociotropic Corruption Voting

The article examines the relationship between corruption and voting behavior by defining two distinct channels: pocketbook corruption voting , i.e. how personal experiences with corruption affect voting behavior; and sociotropic corruption voting , i.e. how perceptions of corruption in society do so. Individual and aggregate data from Slovakia fail to support hypotheses that corruption is an undifferentiated valence issue, that it depends on the presence of a viable anti-corruption party, or that voters tolerate (or even prefer) corruption, and support the hypothesis that the importance of each channel depends on the salience of each source of corruption and that pocketbook corruption voting prevails unless a credible anti-corruption party shifts media coverage of corruption and activates sociotropic corruption voting. Previous studies may have underestimated the prevalence of corruption voting by not accounting for both channels.

Associated with the Past? Communist Legacies and Civic Participation in Post-communist Countries

In this article, we test the effect of communist-era legacies on the large and temporally resilient deficit in civic participation in post-communist countries. To do so, we analyze data from 157 surveys conducted between 1990 and 2009 in twenty-four post-communist countries and forty-two non-post-communist countries. The specific hypotheses we test are drawn from a comprehensive theoretical framework of the effects of communist legacies on political behavior in post-communist countries that we have previously developed. Our analysis suggests that three mechanisms were particularly salient in explaining this deficit: first, the demographic profile (including lower religiosity levels) of post-communist countries is less conducive to civic participation than elsewhere. Second, the magnitude of the deficit increases with the number of years an individual spent under communism but the effects were particularly strong for people socialized in the post-totalitarian years and for those who experienced communism in their early formative years (between ages six and seventeen). Finally, we also find that civic participation suffered in countries that experienced weaker economic performance in the post-communist period, though differences in post-communist democratic trajectories had a negligible impact on participation. Taken together, we leave behind a potentially optimistic picture about civic society in post-communist countries, as the evidence we present suggests eventual convergence toward norms in other non post-communist countries.

Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks

Significance Twitter and other social media platforms are believed to have altered the course of numerous historical events, from the Arab Spring to the US presidential election. Online social networks have become a ubiquitous medium for discussing moral and political ideas. Nevertheless, the field of moral psychology has yet to investigate why some moral and political ideas spread more widely than others. Using a large sample of social media communications concerning polarizing issues in public policy debates (gun control, same-sex marriage, climate change), we found that the presence of moral-emotional language in political messages substantially increases their diffusion within (and less so between) ideological group boundaries. These findings offer insights into how moral ideas spread within networks during real political discussion. Political debate concerning moralized issues is increasingly common in online social networks. However, moral psychology has yet to incorporate the study of social networks to investigate processes by which some moral ideas spread more rapidly or broadly than others. Here, we show that the expression of moral emotion is key for the spread of moral and political ideas in online social networks, a process we call “moral contagion.” Using a large sample of social media communications about three polarizing moral/political issues (n = 563,312), we observed that the presence of moral-emotional words in messages increased their diffusion by a factor of 20% for each additional word. Furthermore, we found that moral contagion was bounded by group membership; moral-emotional language increased diffusion more strongly within liberal and conservative networks, and less between them. Our results highlight the importance of emotion in the social transmission of moral ideas and also demonstrate the utility of social network methods for studying morality. These findings offer insights into how people are exposed to moral and political ideas through social networks, thus expanding models of social influence and group polarization as people become increasingly immersed in social media networks.