Category: Uncategorized

Posted on

Politicized Identity in Digital Spaces: Creating Change through Consciousness-Raising and Mass Mobilization

PI: Melina Much, Ph.D. Candidate, UC Irvine

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,500, Second Century Fund

Project Abstract: Twitter represents an invaluable space for sparking and mobilizing political movements. An example of this is the most recent iteration of the women’s movement, spanning from #Metoo beginning in 2017 to the current moment surrounding the Roe V. Wade Supreme Court leak. This movement represents one of the largest social and political reckonings with sexual violence and women’s reproductive rights with social media being used as a key tool. Using an original dataset of Tweets on the movement over the last three years, this paper provides evidence through text analysis that consciousness-raising efforts using personal testimonials on Twitter helped mobilize individuals by activating more politicized conceptions of their identity groups, namely group consciousness. I propose a combination of topic analysis (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to capture dynamic topical changes in the #Metoo movement’s language on Twitter starting with early consciousness-raising efforts and their subsequent politicized calls to action. In doing this, the paper presents both a novel approach to capturing the space between consciousness-raising and activated identity, as well as using unsupervised machine learning tools that are revamped to understand intersectionality and its nuances in text data. Lastly, the project will utilize structural topic modeling (STM) to understand the determinants of consciousness-raising versus politically mobilized topics.

Posted on

Accepting the Olive Branch? Muslim Leadership and State Accommodation in Belgium and the Netherlands

PI: Yehia S. Mekawi, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Michigan

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $3,614, Second Century Fund

Project Abstract: I study issues of religion, identity and representation, with a focus on how the state interacts with religious minorities in advanced democracies. My dissertation covers the provision of state benefits to Muslim communities at the sub-national level in Belgium and the Netherlands. I seek to explain why sub-national governments often vary in their accommodation of Islam despite operating within shared legal frameworks; in so doing, I identify the political determinants shaping the implementation of nominally bureaucratic policies. I then turn to the political behavior of religious leaders, and examine when and how Muslim leaders decide to cooperate with or shun state-led accommodation efforts. I focus specifically on how religious leaders rely on transnational networks of support to either facilitate relations with the state or substitute them altogether.

Posted on

Political Reasoning, Argumentation, and Attitude Change

PI: Isaac Mehlfaff, Ph.D. Candidate, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,400, Alma Ostrom and Leah Hopkins Civic Education Fund

Project Abstract: How do citizens reason about politics? Does reasoning have the power to change political attitudes? I argue that citizens’ political reasoning capabilities are best utilized not when they attempt to reason on their own or even when they engage in casual political discussion. Instead, citizens are most likely to change their opinions and reduce their reliance on partisan stereotypes when they engage in debate, exchanging and evaluating a series of arguments and counterarguments with a discussion partner. I test this theory with a survey experiment in which I subtly manipulate whether respondents reason in an argumentative or contemplative context. A pilot study reveals that argumentation decreases the extremity of subjects’ political attitudes and results in those attitudes being held less strongly, suggesting the potential for political argumentation to be used as a strategy for depolarization. Elsewhere in my dissertation, I use an innovative combination of online data sources and machine learning to understand how citizens engage each other in debate, change the attitudes of their interlocutors, and have their attitudes changed in turn.