Thread by @sophie_e_hill

📜 New research roundup: social science papers that caught my eye this week! 📜

a 🧵...

"Voter Responses to Fiscal Austerity" by Hübscher, @SattlersThomas, @MarkusWagnerAT

Turns out, Pierson was right! Austerity *is* electorally treacherous - especially in the form of spending cuts (vs tax increases).

cambridge.org/core/journals/…

The paper argues that recent work finding muted (or even positive!) electoral effects of austerity on incumbent support suffers from selection bias: incumbents avoid austerity when they are electorally vulnerable.

Which is all plausible. Though, I wish the paper engaged a little more with the "credibility politics" of austerity.

E.g., in 🇬🇧, the Tories pushed through spending cuts despite clear opposition, but did enough damage to Labour's credibility that they won 3 elections in a row!

This type of vignette/conjoint design is very clean, but makes it difficult to capture the valence aspect of austerity politics.

Of course, this was a big part of Pierson's original thesis: that electoral effects are dependent on blame-shifting and credit-claiming strategies...

"Does Class-Based Campaigning Work? How Working Class Appeals Attract and Polarize Voters" by @JRob617, Stubager, Thau & Tilley

Appeals to the working class increase support among working class voters and (to some extent) polarize voters by class.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

"Polarize" here just means that the gap in support among working class vs upper middle class voters increases.

However, it's pretty remarkable how small the electoral costs are with this strategy! Upper middle class voters are not very bothered by this type of language.

What's especially attractive about these symbolic appeals - especially to right-wing parties! - is that they operate mostly independently of policy/ideology.

And of course, I'm now wondering about the "credibility politics" of class-based appeals. (Bit of a theme emerging here!)

The effect sizes are very large given that this is just "cheap talk"!

Is there really an electoral advantage to be had here? (What's to stop the other party making the same type of appeal?)

And what happens to these effects when we include a "rebuttal" in the vignette (e.g. a sceptical media commentary, or an opposition politician making accusations of hypocrisy)?

"Computational Identification of Media Frames:
Strengths, Weaknesses, and Opportunities" by @pmyteh and Culpepper

Comparing 3 computational methods for identifying media frames (k-means clustering, EFA, STM). Broadly encouraging, though main takeaway is that "scale matters".

Variation in framing may be overwhelmed by other sources of variation (stylistic, vocab). So this approach is most suited to datasets where texts are from the same / similar sources.