Computational Social Science and the Study of Political Communication

Abstract

The challenge of disentangling political communication processes and their effects has grown with the complexity of the new political information environment. But so have scientists' toolsets and capacities to better study and understand them. We map the challenges and opportunities of developing, synthesizing, and applying data collection and analysis techniques relying primarily on computational methods and tools to answer substantive theory-driven questions in the field of political communication. We foreground the theoretical, empirical, and institutional opportunities and challenges of Computational Communication Science (CCS) that are relevant to the political communication community. We also assess understandings of CCS and highlight challenges associated with data and resource requirements, as well as those connected with the theory and semantics of digital signals. With an eye to existing practices, we elaborate on the key role of infrastructures, academic institutions, ethics, and training in computational methods. Finally, we present the six full articles and two forum contributions of this special issue illustrating methodological innovation, as well as the theoretical, practical, and institutional relevance and challenges for realizing the potential of computational methods in political communication..

Political sociology in a time of protest

“…What is more, the increasing availability of digital trace data, and increased use of social media by political elites as a tool of communication, makes it possible to analyse campaign demands and movement frames as well as legislator responsiveness at new levels of granularity (Barberá et al, 2019;Theocharis and Jungherr, 2021). With these data we are able to automate the harvesting of information on the online and offline activity of movement campaigns (Anastasopoulos and Williams, 2019;Zhang and Pan, 2019) as well as the likely information about such mobilization to which legislators are exposed (Barberá et al, 2019;Ennser-Jedenastik et al, 2021).…”

Die Rolle der Medien in der COVID-19-Pandemie

“…Desinformationen werden -wie viele andere soziale Phänomene auchdurch Medien weniger verursacht, als vielmehr aktualisiert, akzentuiert und dramatisiert, mit der Folge, dass sich krisenhafte Prozesse verstärken können [68,69]. Die Kommunikationsforschung ist durch empirische Erfahrungen mit früheren Pandemien prädestiniert, Prozesse und Wirkungen der Desinformation empirisch und systematisch [27,62,[71][72][73] zu analysieren.…”

Handbook of Computational Social Science, Volume 1

“…This is partly also true for the specific field of CCS. However, communication researchers quite early opened up to computational approaches themselves, engaged in further developing computational methods for their purposes and started scholarly discussions in forums quite central to their discipline (e.g., in the computational methods division of the ICA, and in several special journal issues addressing the field; Domahidi, Yang, Niemann-Lenz & Reinecke, 2019;Theocharis & Jungherr, 2021;Van Atteveldt & Peng, 2018). Thus, the computational turn in communication science by now appears to be well embedded into the overall discipline, although "far from being normalized" or "mainstreamed".…”