Political Communication in CONTEXT
Oops, political communication is not just about individual psychological tendencies!
Publication on the International Journal of Communication
Top Student Paper Award from NCA's Political Communication Division
Staying Tuned for Censored Information Sources?
Set out to explain the "anomaly" that mainland Chinese immigrants opt for (note the selective exposure undertone in the wording) censored sources even after moving to a plural information environment, I ended up revealing a much more complex web of contextual influences on people's information practices. Immigrants’ media habits are jointly shaped by intrapersonal deliberation, micro-level contextual cues, mesolevel social networks, and macro-level structures.
This is my M.Phil. thesis and the start of my pursuit of a contextual approach to political communication.
Dissemination of conspiracy theories in... NETWORKS!
Mutual Endorsement Network of Anti-CCP Conspiracists on YouTube.
Backbone Shared Commenter Network of Anti-CCP Conspiracists on YouTube.
Anti-CCP Conspiracists on YouTube
I am leading a series of research investigating the anti-CCP conspiracy circle on YouTube. Considering political conspiracy theories as a combination of factually problematic information and populist morality, we draw on Habermas’s theory of communicative action to analytically distinguish the factual and moral components of conspiracy theories.
Our first study (1) maps out the conspiratorial YouTubers' mutual endorsement network and probes into their political economic connections; (2) situates these channels onto a network of audience attention and studies how conspiracy theories are collaboratively produced by networked YouTubers and audiences; and (3) qualitatively analyze how conspiracists weave together factual and moral claims to build convincing narratives.
Our ongoing research focuses on the audience of conspiracy videos. Anti-CCP conspiracy YouTube is a transnational space where mainland Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau audiences meet and interact with each other. We use an n-gram topic model to understand the topical focuses of each audience segment and take steps to build a supervised machine learning classifier to identify truth and moral rightness claims in the comment section. Our central question is: Given that conspiratorial YouTubers use legitimate moral claims to package their problematic facts, are audiences falling prey to misinformation or seeking moral commiseration? While answering this question, we pay special attention to the "moderation" effect of sociocultural contexts in different Sinophone societies.
Under Review: Qin, Abby Youran, Xiao, F., & Dai, L. Tell China's conspiracy well: Networks and narratives of Anti-CPC YouTube influencers. Paper presented at the 108th Annual National Communication Association (NCA) Conference, New Orleans, USA.
In Preparation: Qin, Abby Youran, Xiao, F., & Dubree, W. Under Conspiracy Videos We Meet: Facts, Norms, and Communities in a Transnational Sinophone Conspiracy Sphere. Poster presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) 2023 Annual Conference, Washington, USA.
[Graduate Student Research Funding ($800) - School of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison.]
Political communication sits in social networks,
Social networks sit in...
PLACES!
Do Places of An Ideology Connect with Each Other?
We take a spatial approach to understand political homophily and a network approach to explain the growing spatial polarization in the U.S. by examining county-level political homophily.
We first calculated all U.S. counties’ ratio of like-minded to cross-cutting connectivity based on human mobility data and the Facebook friendship network (see left-hand figures). Then, we used GLMNet and spatial lag models to explore how a county’s political, economic, and sociocultural characteristics are related to its tendency towards political homophily. We further conducted geographically weighted regression analyses to map out spatial regimes based on different driving mechanisms of local political homophily. By describing and rigorously explaining various ecological factors’ associations with counties’ homophilic tendencies, we bring in a macro-level perspective to enrich our understanding of political homophily and lay the empirical groundwork for further theory building.
In Preparation: Qin, Abby Youran, Dubree, W., & Wagner, M. Do places of an ideology connect with each other? A spatial approach to political homophily.
[Summer PA Award ($7,000) & Conference Travel Grant ($1,000) - Elections Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison]
The spatial variation in communication patterns is partially because...
Local information ecologies are not created equal.
Where is local news drying off?
Despite the resounding alarm of a nationwide decline of local news (Abernathy, 2020; Local News Initiative, 2023), little is known about mechanisms driving the decline. Using the UNC’s 2004 and 2018 local newspaper datasets alongside these respective years’ census and election data, we conduct spatial panel regression analyses to delineate causal relationships between county-level attributes and local news preservation. We further demonstrate the spatial heterogeneity in these relationships through geographically weighted panel regressions.
This map visualizes significant factors explaining the local newspaper preservation processes in different places between 2004 and 2018. Factors include population base (positive effect), economic base (negative effect), and diversity base (negative effect) in 2004, as well as population growth (negative effect), economic growth (positive effect), and domestic migration rate growth (positive effect) within the studied period.
Only the effect of population base is visualized in a continuous way (places colored with a deeper shade of green see stronger positive effects of their 2004 population size and the preservation of their newspapers from 2004 to 2018). Other effects are visualized in a binary way – the appearance of an effect’s corresponding pattern on a place indicates that the specific effect is statistically significant in that place.
Our findings confirm the pattern long observed by media scholars – news media follow the money (Baker, 1995; Pickard, 2019; Usher, 2021). In this way, they often move away from places where they are needed most – those with more racial-ethnic diversity and growing populations. The problem of local news desert is also a problem of spatial inequality, resulting from territorial intersections of stratification factors like class and race/ethnicity, while further influencing the wellbeing of myriads of emplaced communities. We argue that, as a community necessity, the provision of local news should be democratically coordinated and publicly funded. Revitalizing local news through public funding can be the first step towards an equitable and democratic future.
Under Review: Qin, Abby Youran. Where is local news drying off? Mechanisms behind the formation of local news deserts in the U.S. between 2004 and 2018.
Mediated communication is performed to, hopefully, create tangible & physical outcomes.
How Much does Inclusive Local Media Cost?
We seek to collect a comprehensive database of news articles published by 500+ local media outlets across the U.S., use machine learning techniques to analyze their contents and incorporate geographical information to assess how well they serve local communities in various aspects.
In Preparation: Dubree, W. & Qin, Abby Youran. How much does inclusive local media cost: A generalized workflow for journalism performance assessment and budget calculation.
[Research Grant ($5,000) - DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy, Duke University]
Bringing everything together...
Place & network of street politics in a social movement society
Drawing upon the rich literature on social movements and urban politics, I seek to theorize the changing roles played by collective actions in democratic politics. I use GIS methods to illustrate the unequal distribution of movement resources and network analyses to interrogate political parties' strategic appropriation of social movements.
I hope to develop this project into a radical but methodologically robust critique of politics under capitalism, and build a convincing call for political actions structured around lived experiences of local communities. We can only carve out space for reciprocity, solidarity, and democracy by starting from the very soil we stand on.
Please refer to my Google Scholar page for a full publication list.