Elite & Mass Political Behavior

Politicians, celebrities, and other major figures have a big influence on society. They drive conversations, determine policy, and set fashion trends. Our researchers examine the response of political elites to our new media environment, and the impact of social media on political behavior.

Academic Research

  • Journal Article

    The Trump Advantage in Policy Recall Among Voters

    American Politics Research, 2024

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    Research in political science suggests campaigns have a minimal effect on voters’ attitudes and vote choice. We evaluate the effectiveness of the 2016 Trump and Clinton campaigns at informing voters by giving respondents an opportunity to name policy positions of candidates that they felt would make them better off. The relatively high rates of respondents’ ability to name a Trump policy that would make them better off suggests that the success of his campaign can be partly attributed to its ability to communicate memorable information. Our evidence also suggests that cable television informed voters: respondents exposed to higher levels of liberal news were more likely to be able to name Clinton policies, and voters exposed to higher levels of conservative news were more likely to name Trump policies; these effects hold even conditioning on respondents’ ideology and exposure to mainstream media. Our results demonstrate the advantages of using novel survey questions and provide additional insights into the 2016 campaign that challenge one part of the conventional narrative about the presumed non-importance of operational ideology.

    Date Posted

    Oct 30, 2024

  • Journal Article

    Digital Town Square? Nextdoor's Offline Contexts and Online Discourse

    Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 2024

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    There is scant quantitative research describing Nextdoor, the world's largest and most important hyperlocal social media network. Due to its localized structure, Nextdoor data are notoriously difficult to collect and work with. We build multiple datasets that allow us to generate descriptive analyses of the platform's offline contexts and online content. We first create a comprehensive dataset of all Nextdoor neighborhoods joined with U.S. Census data, which we analyze at the community-level (block-group). Our findings suggests that Nextdoor is primarily used in communities where the populations are whiter, more educated, more likely to own a home, and with higher levels of average income, potentially impacting the platform's ability to create new opportunities for social capital formation and citizen engagement. At the same time, Nextdoor neighborhoods are more likely to have active government agency accounts---and law enforcement agencies in particular---where offline communities are more urban, have larger nonwhite populations, greater income inequality, and higher average home values. We then build a convenience sample of 30 Nextdoor neighborhoods, for which we collect daily posts and comments appearing in the feed (115,716 posts and 163,903 comments), as well as associated metadata. Among the accounts for which we collected posts and comments, posts seeking or offering services were the most frequent, while those reporting potentially suspicious people or activities received the highest average number of comments. Taken together, our study describes the ecosystem of and discussion on Nextdoor, as well as introduces data for quantitatively studying the platform.

    Date Posted

    May 29, 2024

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