🚨New pub alert! 🚨 Out now in New Media & Society, @Dan_S_Lane (@CommUcsb) and I explore the utility of re-framing the goal of confronting racist speech online from attitude change to norm setting. A 🧵 (1/7) @politicalscience@communicationscholars@socialpsych
We conclude by noting that attitude change as a goal does little to change the social power dynamics in which racism thrives. It's based on the hope that racist speakers will refrain from such behavior out of the goodness of their heart. Norm-setting addresses power dynamics. 6/7 @politicalscience@communicationscholars@socialpsych
Following the #Polish#election this evening. A weird (to me) detail I have noticed is that votes from Poles living abroad are all assigned to the Warsaw constituency.
I'm not sure I have ever seen an arrangement like that before, though may simply be my ignorance. Aren't overseas voters generally assigned to either their 'home' constituency, or an overseas constituency? Anyone have a similar example from elsewhere?
@politicalscience In quantitative research, there also disagreements (potential outcomes vs DAGs, for example). Overall, however, there is a more coherent framework and standards for assessing the quality of RDs, DiD etc.
A second issue could be that the standards of good qualitative research have been rising over the past 10 years (regardless of what standard you pick). Empirical research needs some time to catch up with rising standards.
6/
@politicalscience Editors have a lot of discretion when deciding about submissions. A large part of how the discretion is used remains invisible from the outside. I really like the idea of doing an internal audit of editorial decisions, desk rejections in particular. It would be interesting to do an audit for 2022 (I think the last one was some time ago) and to take other journals on board that report similar numbers for qualitative submissions 7/
Doom thinking is unproductive, I know, but it is hard not to feel a type of existential dread when faced with the latest climate science research. The ongoing research on the AMOC (Atlantic Meridian Ocean Current), for example, provides more and more terrifying results.
Political scientists: I really feel that we need to be fully aware of this research and we need to integrate it more seriously in our own research programmes!
In his Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly this February, Putin referred to Stolypin as "a patriot and a proponent of a strong Russian state" and cited him to the effect that the State Duma should be patriotic, i.e. should subordinate itself.
Citing Stolypin: “In the cause of defending Russia, all of us must unite and coordinate our efforts, our commitements and our rights for supporting one historical supreme right – the right of Russia to be strong.” No political opposition permitted
Favoured by Putin himself, Stolypin got his statue in Moscow already in 2012 (though the statue was not placed on Lubyanka square to fill the empty spot where the toppled Dzerzhinsky used to stand, as Nikita Mikhalkov had proposed as early as 2001 - as I outline in the chapter linked below).
Great follow up from The Insider on recent SovFed statements about more aggressive measures to restrict VPNs that enable circumventing censorship in Russia (again illustrating SovFed is not the place where to expect tech expertise...).
Worth translating if you're interested in the topic of VPNs in Russia.
@Marielle_W@politicalscience I‘d say the government is already successful. No ordinary person without a foreign credit card can be expected to juggle services and protocols, hoping his traffic is obsfucated enough to pass through DPI unnoticed
@lokshin@politicalscience Absolutely, especially if we consider data security along with whether users are able to access blocked resources (emphasis in much of Western assessments is on the latter)
@Marielle_W@politicalscience But if Apple are not making money from Russia, then why would they be so attentive to what Roskomnadzor wants? I just checked, and the podcast is also not available in Denmark.
@anderspuck@politicalscience That is, indeed, quite puzzling. I already wondered whether the removal was geographically limited or global (since Meduza did not specify thus point) - thanks for confirming that it appears restricted elsewhere as well
Freedom House has kicked off promotion for the launch of the 2023 #FreedomOnTheNet ranking on 4 Oct.
As a primer, have a look at our recent article with @tanyalokot on how competing rankings have shaped global understandings of what internet freedom is (and isn't)
We adopt a relational approach to explain how & why such a complex landscape of internet freedom rankings has emerged and identify how the ranking organisations’ varying approaches to capturing internet freedom have played a role in defining and legitimating it as a global issue.
Since both the uses of the internet and discussions about what freedom means in relation to it have developed so rapidly, ranking organisations have had to continually respond to these developments, negotiating their authority in relation to other actors in their field.
As we approach the annual media event that surrounds the launch of FoTN, our article can serve as a useful primer for what internet freedom rankings can - and cannot - tell us.
My interest is eminently academic @jimkennedy. Rescaling is a fact, whatever the outcome might be now after Sanchez, Puigdemont, and Aragones, seems to be looking for a common ground, what was highly unlikely in 2017. Time matters also in #politics. @politicalscience@politicaltheory
@jimkennedy@politicalscience@politicaltheory My take is that the current momentum is extremely relevant having people with different view around a table, far from the simplistic 155 article and Rajoy's marsimonious inactivity by sending police to crash, both “illegal” and “constitutive referendum”. Words matter: illegal officially but it showed a will.
Although I already joined last year, tooting still feels very novel to me—so I honestly don‘t know whether this will be read at all, but it‘s PUBLICATION DAY🚨:
Thrilled to share my article in REGIONAL & FEDERAL STUDIES:
I make a provocative, but as I believe necessary point:
To advance the study of comparative federalism, we need to study federalism through the lenses of interest group & lobbying
@brueckmann@politicalscience ❤️ thanks a million, Gracia, for being so responsive and supportive and PLEASE let me echo this: I‘ll try to boost you as much as I can 🐘! Enjoy the retreat and heartfelt thanks again
Very grateful to receive the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) Early Career Award for my research on the visible and invisible mechanisms of information control in authoritarian states
Receiving this prize truly is an honour, and I'm particularly grateful to the institutions (and mentors!) that have supported me in pursuing research across established disciplinary boundaries, including:
Maastricht University (FASoS), University of Helsinki (HCAS & Aleksanteri Institute), Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS), NWO, Helsingin Sanomat Foundation, Leibniz IOS Regensburg, Leibniz Institute for Media Research (Hans Bredow Institute).
Such awards tend to reinforce the idea of 'individual excellence' in academic research and push collaboration to the background. I'm immensely grateful to my co-authors, collaborators and network.
The best research emerges when we think together #TeamScience
🚨New pub alert! 🚨 Out now in New Media & Society, @Dan_S_Lane (@CommUcsb) and I explore the utility of re-framing the goal of confronting racist speech online from attitude change to norm setting. A 🧵 (1/7) @politicalscience@communicationscholars@socialpsych
Given the descriptive norms of social media and how entrenched racist attitudes might be, confronting racist speech to change such attitudes might seem impossible. But setting social norms against racist speech may seem like a more achievable task. 2/7 @politicalscience@communicationscholars@socialpsych
We explore this in an online survey experiment conducted during the 2020 U.S. presidential election and find that white social media users reported greater willingness to confront online racist speech for the purpose of norm setting than for the purpose of attitude change. 3/7 @politicalscience@communicationscholars@socialpsych
@Marielle_W@politicalscience@tanyalokot#Freedomhouse totally belongs in the #hypocrisy dog house. They claim to “Protect a Free and #OpenInternet” and yet their own website is on a repressive exclusive #Cloudflare site. WTF. They actually claim¹ CF can talk about “Internet blocking and the consequences for human rights.” I had a medical emergency & could not access health info because of Cloudflare.
For the offline component of the 4th edition of our teaching partnership, the Digital Constitutionalism Network is in Padova this week with brilliant students from University of Padova, Dublin City University and University of Bremen
The intensive week of lectures and group work in Padova builds upon the virtual component before the summer. To learn more about the Blended Intensive Programme coordinated by the Digital Constitutionalism Network, check out the blog post on the virtual part.
The BIP is organised by Claudia Padovani, Andrea Pettrachin, Edoardo Celeste and Dennis Redeker with contributions by various members of the Digital Constitutionalism Network, including Mauro Santaniello and Marianne Franklin