#OpenAccess -

Believing What Politicians Communicate: Ideological Presentation of Self and Voters’ Perceptions of Politician Ideology - https://cup.org/4gTSToM

- @hjghassell.bsky.social, @michaelheseltine.bsky.social & @reuning.bsky.social ‬

#FirstView

🥳 Our new paper is out at the British Journal of Political Science. We find a strong link between the ideology of candidate messaging and the perceived ideology of these candidates among voters.
Evidence that voters can differentiate between candidates and are attuned to what candidates say.

📜Preprint!📜
GPT5 replacing GPT4 effectively renders a whole range of existing GPT-reliant research unreproduceable. Open-source LLMs offer a science-friendly alternative, but which to use? I test 28 different LLMS in 7 languages so you can pick the best models for your task. osf.io/preprints/os...

I have a new paper forthcoming at BJPS with @hjghassell.bsky.social and @michaelheseltine.bsky.social looking at how social media messaging impacts perceptions of incumbent/candidate ideology. We find messaging ideology does relate to perceptions w/overtime changes

Pre-print: osf.io/preprints/so...

R&P editors' collection 2024 (2/4)

@michaelheseltine.bsky.social & B. C. von Hohenberg find that GPT-4 coding of political text is highly accurate for shorter texts, but performance drops for longer ones, suggesting consideration should be given to task complexity when using LLM-assisted coding.

🚨New at AJPS to start off the year! Do partisans change their news consumption based on daily news sentiment about their team? Democrats read more news on bad days for Republicans and less on bad days for Dems. Republicans turn to more conservative news on bad days for Republicans.

Democrats reduce news consumption when daily news sentiment is negative toward Democrats & increase it when it is negative toward Republicans. Republicans respond to negative Republican sentiment by increasing consumption at conservative news outlets.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

My article "Asymmetric Polarization in Online Media Engagement in the United States Congress" is published in the latest edition of IJPP. Republican media engagement and sharing on social media has increased in extremity over time, but not Democratic. Clear Trump effect. doi.org/10.1177/1940...

✏️New in Political Communication ✏️ w/ great coauthors.
We examine perceived polarization in the US and Poland. Both exposure to partisan news and exposure to general coverage with polarization reporting frames increase perceived personal distance from other side.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

🚨New paper in R&P: Testing GPT-4 on a range of common political science coding tasks in 4 languages. We find generally strong results at a fraction of the time and cost. We also introduce an effective double-code and validate approach for LLM coding. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

🚨Was the COVID-19 pandemic a rhetorically unifying or divisive event for elites in the US? I test this at the federal, state, and local level. Initially COVID was a unifying event, but quickly became a divisive topic, especially for Congressional Republicans.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New paper in IJPP 🚨 How do Members of Congress engage with the media online? From news link sharing and media mentions from MoC over the last 10 years I find clear asymmetric polarization in news media engagement over time, driven by Republican Members... Polisky
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

👍 Across tasks and languages, we test the viablility of LLMs like GPT-4 to replace human coders for machine learning training data, with mostly strong results! Negligable downstream effects on trained transformer models. We also offer a suggested pipeline for researchers.
Polisky
osf.io/cx752

New analysis of Trump's endorsements from 2018 to 2022 shows that he gave Republicans a double-digit boost in primaries — and cost them vote margin in the general. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

New Publication 🚨 I examine Donald Trump's endorsements in congressional races while in and out of office (2018-2022). Endorsed candidates receive a small vote penalty overall. Trump backed more safe candidates and allies (election deniers) in 2022. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...