🗣 Communication Paper Picnic 🧺: Public Opinion

I checked 7 public opinion journals on Wednesday, November 12, 2025 using the Crossref API. For the period November 05 to November 11, I found 6 new paper(s) in 4 journal(s).

Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties

Is a snapshot enough? Repeated list experiments in autocratizing Hong Kong under the National Security Law

Tetsuro Kobayashi, Jaehyun Song, Polly Chan

Full text

Politics, Groups, and Identities

The effects of ethnic diversity and polarization on turnout in student government elections

Adam G. Rutkowski, Brandon Stewart

Full text

Public Opinion Quarterly

Why Do Some Union Members Vote Republican? The Role of Workplace Political Discussion

David Macdonald

Full text

Labor union members are more likely to vote than their nonunionized counterparts, and when they do vote, are more likely to support the Democratic Party. However, a sizable minority of union members vote Republican. This is puzzling, given that the national Republican Party has long been hostile toward organized labor. Extant research has clearly demonstrated that union and nonunion members differ in their voting behavior, but we know little about such variation among union members. I explore this latter phenomenon here, arguing that the frequency of workplace political discussion plays an important role in shaping how labor union members vote. I test this with data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES). Overall, I find that workplace discussion of politics is positively and significantly associated with the probability that labor union members vote Democrat. This appears to occur via a “learning” mechanism, in which greater workplace discussion of politics leads union members to recognize which candidate is more “prolabor.” Overall, these findings help us better understand the consequences of the workplace, political discussion, and the politics of American labor unions.

Social Science Computer Review

Media Visibility and Information-Seeking: Analyzing the Impact of News Coverage on Wikipedia Pageviews of Estonian MPs (2015–2023)

Tatiana Lupacheva

Full text

The news media are a primary but limited source of political information for voters. This article examines how the media coverage of members of parliament (MPs) prompts people to seek more information about MPs—an important element of voters’ political knowledge and democratic accountability. I use all available online content from four major Estonian newspapers during 2015–2023 ( ∼ 140,000 articles) and pre-trained transformer models to classify the sentiment and policy issues of news articles that mention MPs. I match media data with MPs’ Wikipedia pageviews on a daily basis over two legislative terms. First, the results show that media visibility of MPs is associated with more views of their Wikipedia page on the same day. Second, news articles with negative sentiment have a greater impact on information-seeking than those with a positive or neutral tone. Third, the impact of MPs' media appearances on information-seeking is dependent on the policy context as well as party affiliation. The findings have implications for understanding the consequences of political communication and democratic representation in the digital age.

AI’s Sociological Era

Jenny L. Davis, Mona Sloane

Full text

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a social structure cloaked in technical blackboxes and polarizing narratives. Sociology is the study of society from a structural perspective, delineating the interplays between individuals, organizations, institutions, and cultures. Sociology’s disciplinary lens is necessary to understand AI’s infrastructural force, reflecting and shaping politics, economies, knowledge, and interpersonal spheres. Yet to date, the field of AI research has been dominated by computer science and engineering, underutilizing the explanatory power of sociological theories and methods honed by the discipline over more than a century. Building on a collection of papers that illustrate AI as both a product and driver of social patterns and processes, we demonstrate that the diffusion of AI necessitates sociological analyses now more than ever, positioning sociology at the forefront of AI studies’ next era.

Incivility in Reddit’s Top Political and News Subreddits: Prevalence, Moderation, and Engagement

Chris J. Vargo, Tobias Hopp

Full text

We examine incivility across twenty high-traffic political and news subreddits to test how platform governance and social identity cues relate to on-platform discourse and participation. Building on theories of democratic communication and incivility, platform affordances and moderation, and uses-and-gratifications/network externalities, we specify how decentralized community rules and explicit in-group orientations could shape both the prevalence of uncivil language and patterns of engagement. We analyze a year-long, random sample of submissions and comments scored with established computational measures of incivility, and we link these scores to subreddit-level rule regimes and identity signaling. By distinguishing interpersonal impoliteness from democratic norm violations and by evaluating moderation complexity at the community level, this work clarifies when and how community governance relates to discourse quality and participation dynamics on Reddit. Findings inform ongoing debates about the efficacy of hybrid, human-centered moderation and the role of explicit identity norms in large online communities.