Kyu S. Hahn

Cross‐National versus Individual‐Level Differences in Political Information: A Media Systems Perspective

Abstract We propose a context‐dependent approach to the study of political information. Combining a content analysis of broadcast news with a national survey measuring public awareness of various events, issues, and individuals in the news, we show that properties of national media systems influence both the supply of news and citizens’ awareness of events in the news. Public service‐oriented media systems deliver hard news more frequently than market‐based systems. It follows that for citizens living under public service regimes, the opportunity costs of exposure to hard news are significantly lowered. Lowered costs allow less interested citizens to acquire political knowledge. Our analyses demonstrate that the knowledge gap between the more and less interested is widest in the US and smallest in Scandinavia.

Fragmentation in the Twitter Following of News Outlets The Representation of South Korean Users’ Ideological and Generational Cleavage

In recent years, Twitter emerged as an important news driver as most major news organizations now provide newsfeeds via Twitter. We classified 34 South Korean news outlets based on the pattern of co-following among 709,586 Twitter users. We also had a rare opportunity to match their following behavior with individual-level attributes by relying on supplementary survey data on 1,811 members of an online survey panel. Our results reveal that partisan and generational selectivity sharply polarizes news following on Twitter, suggesting that Twitter is likely to reinforce the existing political divisions in society by reducing the likelihood of chance encounters with the disagreeable views.

Economic and Cultural Drivers of Immigrant Support Worldwide

Employing a comparative experimental design drawing on over 18,000 interviews across eleven countries on four continents, this article revisits the discussion about the economic and cultural drivers of attitudes towards immigrants in advanced democracies. Experiments manipulate the occupational status, skin tone and national origin of immigrants in short vignettes. The results are most consistent with a Sociotropic Economic Threat thesis: In all countries, higher-skilled immigrants are preferred to their lower-skilled counterparts at all levels of native socio-economic status (SES). There is little support for the Labor Market Competition hypothesis, since respondents are not more opposed to immigrants in their own SES stratum. While skin tone itself has little effect in any country, immigrants from Muslim-majority countries do elicit significantly lower levels of support, and racial animus remains a powerful force.

The Network of Celebrity Politics: Political Implications of Celebrity Following on Twitter

With the rise of networked media such as Twitter, celebrities’ ability to speak on policy matters directly to the public has become amplified. We investigate the political implications of celebrity activism on Twitter by estimating the political ideology of thirty-four South Korean news outlets and fourteen political celebrities based on the co-following pattern among 1,868,587 Twitter users. We also had a rare opportunity to match their following behavior with individual-level attributes by relying on supplementary survey data on 11,953 members of an online survey panel. Our results reveal that celebrity following on Twitter is ideologically skewed; a vast majority of Korean Twitter users following politically influential celebrities are liberal. Additionally, survey results show that political celebrities are more likely to attract those lacking the ability to process one-sided information in a balanced manner.

The Influence of “Social Viewing” on Televised Debate Viewers’ Political Judgment

Social media could serve as an easy and fast window to the climate of public opinion. In the current study, we examined the influence of perceived opinion climate revealed via Twitter postings in shaping televised debate viewers’ candidate evaluation. We conducted two Web-based experiments in the high- and low-stimulus elections: (a) the 2012 Korean presidential election and (b) the 2014 Seoul mayoral election. Instead of using contrived stimulus materials, we were able to examine the influence of exposure to Twitter postings in voters’ judgment of candidate performance in real time. Using a custom-designed Web application, participants evaluated the candidates as debate-related Twitter postings were being fed in real time during each televised debate. Our results suggest that exposure to Twitter postings has induced significant bandwagon effects. Bandwagon effects were pervasive even among partisans and the knowledgeable. Our findings show that more policy efforts ought to be made to strengthen the informative role of social viewing.

A Least Squares Method for Detecting Multiple Change Points in a Univariate Time Series

Detecting and interpreting influential turning points in time series data is a routine research question in many disciplines of applied social science research. Here we propose a method for identifying important turning points in a univariate time series. The most rudimentary methods are inadequate when the researcher lacks preexisting expectations or hypotheses concerning where such turning points ought to exist. Other alternatives are computationally intensive and dependent on strict model assumptions. Our method is fused LASSO regression, a variant of regularized least squares method, providing a convenient alternative for estimation and inference of multiple change points under mild assumptions. We provide two examples to illustrate the method in social science applications. First, we assessed the validity of our method by reanalyzing the Greenback prices data used in (Willard et al. in Am Econ Rev 86:1001–1017, 1996). We next used the method to identify major change points in President Clinton’s approval ratings.

Partisan selective following on twitter over time: polarization or depolarization?

ABSTRACT In this study, we track the severity of partisan polarization in the following of legislators on Twitter during the initial two years of Twitters introduction to South Korea. We examine the pattern of co-following among Twitter users following members of the 18th Korean National Assembly at three time points. We collected a complete list of all followers for each legislator and constructed their co-following network. We also supplemented our following data with survey data. This allowed us to match the same Twitter users following behavior with their individual level attributes. Our aggregate level analysis showed that the severity of polarization in Twitter following of National Assembly members lessened from Time 1 to Time 3. We also discovered that, even when tracking only the ‘original’ followers, cross-party following has increased over time. The survey-based results reaffirm our conclusion based on the aggregate data.