The Return of the “Lurker”: A Longitudinal Study of Citizens’ Use of Social Media in Danish Elections 2011, 2015, and 2019

In this case study on Denmark, we particularly focus on trajectories of participation, the question of increasing mobilization, and the perceived outcomes in terms of efficacy. Contrary to other studies, we seek to establish a coherent perspective including the “silent majority.” By combining studies of participation, mobilization, and efficacy, we wish to provide not only a rigorous documentation of mobilization and efficacy of social media during election campaigns, but also a historic documentation of the participatory use and perception of social media as a democratic and political tool during three national election campaigns from 2011 to 2019.

Quality of Understanding in Communication among and between Political Parties, Mass Media, and Citizens: An Empirical Study of the 2013 Austrian National Election

The study investigates the extent to which political parties, the mass media, and citizens follow qualitative principles demanded by the public sphere concept in political campaign communications. Using the index of a quality of understanding (IQU), it analyses the press releases and Facebook posts of political parties, newspaper articles, and responses by citizens in the form of comments in newspaper forums and on parties’ Facebook pages (N=7,525) during the 2013 Austrian national election. Considering that the quality of understanding of public discourse is measured on a 100-point scale, which serves as a benchmark representing perfect understanding, observed real-world values are often rather low. Austrian political parties scored the highest IQU of 28.35 points, and hence can be described as most closely following the principles of an ideal communication orientation. The quality of understanding is the lowest in everyday political discussion on Facebook, where political parties’ posts have an IQU of 17.97 points. The difference of 10.38 points to the highest achieved value of 28.35 reveals different deliberative communication practices between well-considered and strategically formulated communication in press releases as well as newspaper articles and everyday communication including citizens’ comments on Facebook and newspaper articles, which take different configurations.

The Generative Politics of Presentism in Post-15M Spain

This essay revises post-15M movement political party landscape, emphasizing the intentional yet unusual use of the present within the New Left's organizing grammar. Against sectors of the traditional Left, who see presentism as a product of neoliberalism, I claim that in the post-15M conjuncture, the present constituted a battleground in the struggle for a dignified life. First, I focus on the Catalan left-wing nationalist party CUP's use of anarchist symbols to suggest that references to sabotage were deployed to disrupt parliamentary politics, forcing constant interruption. Second, I analyze Podemos founding member Iñigo Errejón's speech after the party's 2016 national election defeat, where his rhetoric linked the temporality of the present with anti-austerity protestors’ embodied presence. Last, I read the rise of neomunicipalisms as another iteration of presentism, aiming to politicize everyday life. To conclude, I advance that such material practices of “generative presentism” problematize presentism's assumed depoliticizing nature.

Perceived Discrimination against Black Americans and White Americans

A widely-cited study reported evidence that White Americans reported higher ratings of how much Whites are the victims of discrimination in the United States than of how much Blacks are the victims of discrimination in the United States. However, much fewer than half of White Americans rated discrimination against Whites in the United States today to be greater or more frequent than discrimination against Blacks in the United States today, in data from the American National Election Studies 2012 Time Series Study or in preregistered analyses of data from the American National Election Studies 2016 Time Series Study or from a 2017 national nonprobability survey. Given that relative discrimination against Black Americans is a compelling justification for policies to reduce Black disadvantage, results from these three surveys suggest that White Americans’ policy preferences have much potential to move in a direction that disfavors programs intended to reduce Black disadvantage.

Making Better Choices

Making Better Choices is about how we make decisions together and the tools we use to get to those decisions. We make joint decisions out of necessity because the choices we make affect each other. Each decision we take has a consequence. This book reinforces why we need better systems design and analyses given the consequences of our decisions. It is also about carefully thinking about the values of the choices we make, whether they occur in a small meeting of individuals in a local association or community or in a national election. It will illuminate the differences between sincere behavior and strategic behavior to defeat an opponent in voting, the latter being quite common. The book will also review different voting systems, what their original intents were, and what their deficits are. In trying to bring all these topics together and more, the authors realized that the book is in essence an outcome of the arranged marriage between social choice and systems engineering that they conducted. The more one begins to explore the aspects of social choice and systems engineering, the more one realizes how much they have in common, and how much more they can offer if they are unified.

Hindsight Bias and Electoral Outcomes: Satisfaction Counts More Than Winner-Loser Status

The tendency to perceive outcomes as more foreseeable once they are available is a well-known phenomenon. However, research on the cognitive and motivational factors that induce individuals to overestimate the foreseeability of an electoral outcome has yielded inconsistent findings. In three studies based on large-scale electoral surveys (ITANES, Italian National Election Studies), we argued that the tendency to perceive an electoral outcome as foreseeable is positively and consistently associated with satisfaction with the outcome. Across all studies, satisfaction with the outcome was significantly and positively associated with retrospective foreseeability, above and beyond voters’ preference for a “winning” or “losing” party. In Study 3, a measure of memory distortion of pre-electoral forecasts was included, which was only weakly associated with retrospective foreseeability, but not with satisfaction for the outcome, supporting the notion of different levels of hindsight bias associated with different cognitive and motivational factors.