Computational Political Communication

Yannis Theocharis holds the Chair of Digital Governance at the Technical University of Munich. His research interests are in political behavior, political communication, harmful speech and content moderation and computational social science. He is a core member of the Munich Data Science Institute and director of the Content Moderation Lab at the TUM Think Tank. Andreas Jungherr holds the Chair for Political Science, especially Digital Transformation at the University of Bamberg’s Institute for Political Science. His research explores the impact of digital media on politics and society, with a particular emphasis on algorithms, artificial intelligence, and governance. He also investigates the challenges scientific research faces in response to digital change, aiming to unlock the opportunities presented by new data sources and analytical methods. His work centres on leveraging digital methods and computational social science, while also addressing the methodological challenges of integrating these approaches into the social sciences.

Introduction: Computational Social Science and the Study of Political Communication 1. Capturing Clicks: How the Chinese Government Uses Clickbait to Compete for Visibility 2. Politicians’ Self-depiction and Their News Portrayal: Evidence from 28 Countries Using Visual Computational Analysis 3. Facing the Electorate: Computational Approaches to the Study of Nonverbal Communication and Voter Impression Formation 4. Political Polarization on the Digital Sphere: A Cross-platform, Over-time Analysis of Interactional, Positional, and Affective Polarization on Social Media 5. Dictionaries, Supervised Learning, and Media Coverage of Public Policy 6. Computational Identification of Media Frames: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Opportunities 7. Advancing Interdisciplinary Work in Computational Communication Science 8. The Trouble with Sharing Your Privates: Pursuing Ethical Open Science and Collaborative Research across National Jurisdictions Using Sensitive Data