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27 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, down 20% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Oct 26, 2026

Frankly Speaking: The Company Election Integrity Keeps in Congressional Communication

Election integrity is a shared commitment in American politics, but Democrats and Republicans in Congress increasingly mean different things by it. Analyzing 10,420 congressional e-newsletters sent from 2010 to 2025, we examine how the two parties invoke election terms such as integrity,'' security,'' and

fraud.'' Using diachronic word embeddings, which track semantic change through how words are used in context, we measure how differently each party uses each term, how much each party shifts, and whether they share nearest semantic neighbors. We show that members of Congress do not need different words to tell different stories about elections. They need only place those same words in different company. Across nearly every term and year, the two parties surround election-integrity vocabulary with entirely different words. That divergence is easy to miss, because most election vocabulary is no more divergent than other words used at roughly the same frequency, and neither party's usage shifted more than the other's. Only a subset of terms grew more divergent, most notably

certification,'' while rigged'' and stolen'' entered election discourse after 2020 and polarized there. By 2024, Democrats surround voter,'' election,'' and integrity'' with the language of access and administration. Republicans surround the same terms with citizenship verification,'' noncitizen voting,'' and border security.'' For one party, integrity means protecting eligible voters' ability to cast a ballot. For the other, it means protecting the electoral process from illegitimate ballots. Election officials, who must administer a single system under both definitions, inherit this tension.

Michael A. Robinette, Christina Barsky, Amanda D. Clark +2

Vermont Complex Systems Institute, University of Vermont, Burlington, 05405, U.S.A. · Community Development and Applied Economics, University of Vermont, Burlington, 05405, U.S.A. · Department of Computer Science, University of Vermont, Burlington, 05405, U.S.A. +1

Political Communication Political Discourse Analysis

Oct 23, 2026

Analysing Austrian Parliamentary Speeches by Predicting Party Affiliations

This paper examines speech characteristics of the Austrian National Council members (CMs). We introduce analysis methodology based on a fine-tuned BERT-Model which assigns to every speech a probability distribution over Austrian parties. These are then aggregated at the speaker and party level. We perform an extensive evaluation to ensure the quality of the generated distributions prior to further analysis. Instead of considering mis-assignments of predicted parties as a performance issue, we leverage them to derive insights about the CMs and political developments. Our findings show that parties that govern together become more similar in their speech characteristics, while, analogously, parties that are in opposition move further away from governing parties. Moreover, CMs who switch party usually adapt their speech characteristics only after the switch occurs. Finally, we publicly release a data set containing party affiliation predictions for the speeches of the Austrian National Council from 1996 to 2018.

Sarah Sulollari, Vanja Karan, Benjamin Roth

University of Vienna

Political Discourse Analysis Political Communication

Oct 16, 2026

Validating LLM-generated political networks with survey-reported partisan exposure

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human behavior in social science research, including decisions, interactions, and social relationships. However, in network formation tasks, existing evaluations often focus on aggregate network properties, while networks with plausible structural properties may still fail to reproduce individuals' social and political environments. Here, we generate LLM-based political networks using personas sampled from the nationally representative ANES 2020--2022 Social Media Study and use respondents' survey-reported partisan exposure as an empirical benchmark for the political environments generated for the corresponding personas. We first characterize the structural properties and political assortativity of the generated networks, and then compare ego-level partisan exposure with the survey. We find that the structure and political assortativity of the generated networks vary across experimental configurations. More importantly, when comparing generated partisan exposure with the survey, some models generate stronger separation between Democratic and Republican egos than reported in the survey, with higher same-party and lower cross-party exposure, while others mainly underestimate Republican exposure across ego groups. Moreover, networks with similar political assortativity can still generate different partisan environments around the same personas, including among networks with plausible structural properties. Finally, generated networks show group-specific errors, under- or overestimating exposure to either Democrats or Republicans for specific social groups. These findings show that evaluating LLM-based social simulations only through aggregate outcomes can hide errors in the local environments through which those outcomes emerge, highlighting the importance of validation at both aggregate and individual levels.

Marco Tonin, Michele Tizzoni, Bruno Lepri +1

Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Via Verdi 26, Trento, I-38122, Italy. · Mobile and Social Computing Lab (MobS), Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Via Sommarive 18, Trento, I-38123, Italy. · Data Science Section, IT University of Copenhagen, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, Copenhagen, DK-2300, Denmark.

Large Language Model-Based Social Simulation Social Network Analysis Synthetic Data Generation Political Communication

Oct 15, 2026

Political Narratives in the 2024 Moldovan Presidential Election: Stance, Amplification, and Influence

Social media platforms play a central role in shaping political discourse during elections, particularly in geopolitically contested regions. We study how political narratives emerged, aligned, and propagated during the 2024 Moldovan presidential election by analyzing publicly available posts collected from X, Facebook, and Reddit between August and October 2024. Combining multilingual stance detection, coordination analysis, and causal inference, we examine both descriptive and causal mechanisms underlying online political discourse. First, we apply large language models to classify stance toward European integration, Russia, and the two main presidential candidates, revealing clear cross-platform and cross-linguistic differences in how political positions are expressed. Second, we construct retweet-based and semantic alignment networks on X to identify amplification and aligned framing of dominating narratives. Finally, we use a proximal causal inference framework to estimate peer influence effects in stance formation. Our results indicate consistently positive and statistically significant average treatment effects across major stance categories. These findings provide evidence that amplification and peer exposure contribute to the reinforcement of political narratives online. This work offers the first analysis of social media discourse surrounding the 2024 Moldovan presidential election and demonstrates the value of integrating language-based annotation, network analysis, and causal inference for studying political influence in multilingual and geopolitically sensitive contexts.

Andrea Piras, Osman Rahmoun, Elena Zheleva

Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, USA

Political Communication Political Discourse Analysis Social Media Analysis

Oct 15, 2026

High prevalence of antagonizing rhetoric in trending topics on Twitter/X

Disagreement between political opponents is a central element of democracy. This disagreement can be voiced in different ways. An opponent can be antagonized, i.e. portrayed as an enemy that needs to be overcome, or they can be criticized, i.e. treated as a legitimate adversary with whom one can engage. While the latter is a fundamental part of democratic exchange, the former can be detrimental to public discourse. Political disagreement increasingly takes place on social media, where negativity towards political out-groups has been found to drive engagement. However, existing research has largely treated such negativity as a single dimension, leaving open whether it is antagonization or criticism that circulates on these platforms. This work addresses this gap by introducing a computational approach to detect these two types of rhetoric in text and identify its targets. On a corpus of over 17 million tweets from trending topics in the German Twittersphere, the method reveals that about a third of all tweets contain antagonizing rhetoric. Comparing tweets from trending topics to a random sample shows that the discourse in trending topics is systematically more antagonizing than ordinary Twitter communication. Combining antagonization detection with a large-scale estimation of users' political leaning, we find that right-leaning users employ antagonizing rhetoric significantly more than their left-leaning counterparts. Furthermore, both forms of oppositional rhetoric are strongly amplified within political camps, with multipliers retweeting them up to twice as often as tweets without oppositional rhetoric. Finally, patterns of antagonized targets reveal how different political camps construct their out-groups, with the right-wing populist party AfD and the Green party as the central antagonists of the opposing camps.

Armin Pournaki, Eckehard Olbrich

Institute of Sociology, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland · Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, Germany · médialab, SciencesPo, Paris, France

Political Discourse Analysis Political Communication Social Media Analysis

Sep 25, 2026

Double-Edged Sword of Mediated Visibility: How Visual Framing Undermines Congresswomen's Perceived Competence

Women's presence in Congress has stalled below 30%. That institutional underrepresentation is mirrored by their limited visibility on televised news, where visual presentation can shape perceived competence and authority. Yet research tells us more about whether congresswomen appear than how they are visually framed. Facial recognition analysis of 695,464 image-text segments from CNN and Fox News (2011-2021) reveals that congresswomen appear disproportionately in split-screen rather than solo shots. Two pre-registered experiments with 6,220 participants show that, in static frames, split-screen framing reduces congresswomen's perceived political competence, but not congressmen's. In dynamic videos, the competence penalty disappears; instead, outraged language reduces a congresswoman's perceived warmth roughly three times as much as a congressman's. Suggestive evidence (p = .057) indicates that women viewers report greater external political efficacy after watching a congresswoman appear alone. We conclude that visual framing shapes both congresswomen's mediated visibility and their perceived capabilities.

Bryce J. Dietrich, Hyein Ko, Myriam Shiran

Purdue University · Case Western Reserve University · The Ohio State University

Political Communication

Sep 15, 2026

Evolution of US Oral Political Language

The analysis of US political language is usually based on the written form (e.g. presidential addresses) or posts broadcasted on various social networks. Oral production, however, which is even more frequent, can better reveal the style and mode of thinking of the speaker. This study covers this mode of linguistic communication by considering 19 candidates from the presidential elections between 1960 to 2024. Our main research objectives are to disclose the main trends hidden in those presidential debates. Do we observe a clear simplification of the US political language over time? Does Trump have poor language compared to the other candidates? Do unusual stylistic features occur only with a single, specific president? Moreover, can we detect a pattern explaining the success or failure of some nominees? Over time, this study demonstrates a significant reduction in political language complexity, a decrease of the mean sentence length, and a noteworthy decline of complex terms. Moreover, the emotional tone increases over the decades, while logical and rational thinking tends to lessen.

Jacques Savoy

Computer Science Dept., University of Neuchatel rue Emile Argand 11, 2000 Neuchatel (Switzerland)

Political Discourse Analysis Political Communication

Sep 15, 2026

Is Trump's Vocabulary Poor? Vocabulary Richness Across Texts of Different Lenghts

This study explores the vocabulary richness of oral political communication. A model explaining the lexicon growth is proposed by subdividing the whole vocabulary into terms generated by general and specialized glossaries.

Dominique Labbe, Cyril Labbe, Jacques Savoy

Science Po, Université Grenoble Alpes · Laboratoire LIG, Université Grenoble Alpes · Computer Science, University of Neuchatel

Political Discourse Analysis Political Communication

Sep 10, 2026

Epistemic orientation predicts legislative effectiveness among members of the US Congress

Truth and evidence-based communication provide important foundations for democratic governance, accountability, and collective decision-making. Prior work shows that evidence-oriented language in US congressional floor speeches has declined since the mid-1970s, alongside broader changes in legislative productivity and polarization. This study shifts the analysis from congressional sessions to individual members of Congress to examine whether epistemic orientation varies systematically across legislators and whether it relates to political behavior and legislative effectiveness. Using the Evidence-Minus-Intuition (EMI) score, we measure the relative prevalence of evidence-oriented versus intuition-oriented language in congressional floor speeches and Twitter posts. We link these measures to legislator-level data on ideology, institutional position, communication context, and Legislative Effectiveness Score (LES). The results show that more ideologically extreme members use less evidence-oriented language on the congressional floor. EMI also exhibits cross-platform consistency with members who use more evidence-oriented language in floor speeches also being more evidence-oriented on Twitter, although EMI is lower on Twitter overall. Finally, EMI in congressional speeches is positively associated with individual legislative effectiveness, even after accounting for ideology and extensive political, institutional, demographic, topical, and communication volume controls. These findings suggest that evidence-oriented language is not only an aggregate feature of congressional discourse but also a meaningful attribute of individual-level legislative communication and effectiveness.

Segun Aroyehun, Stephan Lewandowsky, David Garcia

Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, Germany. · School of Psychological Science, University of Bristol, UK. · Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Germany. +1

Political Discourse Analysis Political Communication

Sep 8, 2026

Detecting Authorship in Political Texts with Inductive Stylometry

Political texts are rarely authored by the nominal speaker alone. Tweets, speeches, reports, and official statements are drafted, edited, or harmonized by staff, yet political science has paid limited attention to the stylistic traces these hidden authors leave behind. This paper develops and stress-tests an inductive stylometric approach for recovering latent authorship structure in political communication, combining character 3-gram features with UMAP dimensionality reduction, and Burrows' Delta. We apply the approach to six corpora that vary in length (from tweets to long documents), in mode (written and oral), and in language (English and Hungarian). The approach recovers near-disjoint analyst fingerprints in formal legal prose in both languages, sorts a politician's tweets into validated subsets while uncovering additional insights, and distinguishes scripted from improvised speech. It fails, however, to resolve individual speechwriters within scripted corpora. Frequency-based stylometry is thus a powerful tool that, depending on authorial signal strength and institutional editing, can uncover authorship traces relevant to legislative studies, political communication, and policy research.

Gennadii Iakovlev, Levente Littvay

Political Discourse Analysis Stylometry Authorship Attribution Political Communication

Aug 6, 2026

The em-dash em-beds in Congress: A population-level rise in em-dash frequency in U.S. congressional press releases at the dawn of the large-language-model era, 2021-2025

Large language models (LLMs) can leave small stylistic traces in text written with their help. The most discussed is the em-dash (U+2014), especially the unspaced form word---word, which is normal in typeset English prose but unusual in U.S. press writing, where AP style calls for spaced dashes. This study asks whether that trace is measurable in congressional press releases. In a preregistered design (OSF: 10.17605/OSF.IO/U5NEY), 146,239 scraper-sourced releases from 480 House and Senate offices (2021-2025, the open congress-press dataset) were analyzed: density of unspaced prose-form em-dashes per 1,000 characters of cleaned text, Poisson/negative-binomial models with a length offset, clustering by office. Density stayed within 0.10-0.12 per 1,000 characters through 2021-2024, then rose to 0.217 in 2025, more than twice the four-year baseline; the share of releases with such an em-dash rose from ~13% to 24.8%. The primary frequency ratio (2023-2025 vs 2021-2022) was 1.55 (95% CI 1.28-1.93; exact registered cut-off: 1.528), just above the prespecified 1.5x threshold. The rise was net-new (hyphen density stable), held within authors (75.6% of 262 continuous offices increased; p ~ 1e-16) and in a closed panel of 224 offices, and survived falsification tests: three placebo cut-offs were null, the pipeline showed no step at the 2024/2025 boundary, and continuing offices carried the rise. A segmented regression finds no step at the ChatGPT cut-off but a clear post-period acceleration; the 2025 rise is symmetric across parties and chambers. Because the registered validation gate was formally breached, the full preregistered decision rule was not met; the interpretation (broad diffusion of LLM-assisted writing as the models matured) is offered as exploratory. The em-dash remains a population-level marker, not a per-release authorship detector, and the design supports no causal claim.

Przemysław Czuma

Polish Association for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine · Polish Association for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (inteligencja.org.pl)

Stylometry Political Communication

Aug 5, 2026

German parties shifted towards intuition-based rhetoric after the far right's parliamentary breakthrough

The spread of misinformation is widely perceived as a threat to democratic deliberation, yet how political elites' rhetorical commitments to truth shift alongside the rise of populist actors remains poorly understood. Analysing 4.5 million tweets and 59,170 parliamentary speeches by German political elites between 2015 and 2025, we measure evidence-based and intuition-based rhetoric using a validated distributed dictionary representation. Across both arenas, intuition-based language has become more prominent, and right-leaning actors consistently exhibit the lowest Evidence Minus Intuition (EMI) scores. The parliamentary entry of the extreme-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in 2017 coincides with sharp downward shifts in EMI across the broader chamber, while a more gradual decline is observed on Twitter. These findings document an association between far-right visibility and a changing approach to truth in elite discourse in a multiparty European democracy.

Peer Saleth, Segun T. Aroyehun, Fabio Carrella +3

Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, Universitätsstraße 10, Konstanz, 78457, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. · Artificial Intelligence Lab (Recod.ai), Institute of Computing, University of Campinas, R. Saturnino de Brito, 573, 13083-852,2026 Campinas, S˜ao Paulo, Brazil. · Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24–25, 14476, Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany. +1

Evidence-Grounded Reasoning Political Discourse Analysis Political Communication

Jul 31, 2026

Comparing and Modeling Argumentation in German Political Communication across Arenas

Deliberation, involving the formulation and exchange of arguments, forms an integral part of political decision making in democracies. Argumentation patterns however differ substantially across different political arenas, such as plenary speeches and committee meetings. However, despite a lot of interest in argumentation, there is comparatively little computational work on analyzing differences in patterns of political argumentation between arenas. Our work addresses this research gap. First, we present a 17k-sentence corpus with annotation for argumentative passages (argument and their justifications, both their boundaries and their categories) across three German political arenas (plenary speeches, committee meetings, and press conferences), keeping the topic (COVID-19) constant. Our analysis of the corpus finds that contrary to expectations, justification by domain-specific expertise is more frequent in press conferences than in committee meetings. Second, we present a pilot study on automatically identifying such argumentative passages. The results show that boundaries are hard to pin down, and models predictions additionally suffer from confirmation bias.

Nina Vikhrova, Johannes Kühling, Sebastian Haunss +1

IMS, Universität Stuttgart · SOCIUM, Universität Bremen

Argument Mining Political Discourse Analysis Computational Argumentation Political Communication

Jul 31, 2026

The persuasive power of large language models does not depend on their perceived national origin

Conversational AI developed by geopolitical rivals reaches citizens worldwide, raising concerns that it could sway public opinion or be rejected as foreign propaganda, with consequences for democratic discourse and information sovereignty. Yet, whether an AI's perceived national origin shapes its persuasive power is unknown. In a preregistered randomized experiment, 403 adults from a nationally representative United States sample held a three-round debate with a chatbot introduced as either American ("DiscoveryAI") or Chinese ("ZhengheAI"), discussing a political or non-political topic. In all conditions, participants actually conversed with the same model (GPT-4o), instructed to argue against their initial position. We combined pre- and post-conversation self-reports of attitudes, trust, and collective narcissism with computational analyses of 1,209 participant turns, including LLM-coded stance and argumentative conduct, stance-sensitive embeddings, and keyword-masked emotion and toxicity classifiers. The conversations produced substantial attitude changes in every condition. Critically, the nationality label affected neither self-reported attitude change nor expressed stance, concessions, counterarguing, or affect, and equivalence tests and Bayes factors largely supported these null effects. The label's only reliable footprint was lower pre-conversation human-like trust in the Chinese model, whereas functionality trust was unaffected. Political topics slowed stance movement toward the AI's position, and collective narcissism predicted less attitude change regardless of origin, acting as a general barrier rather than an out-group filter. Users thus initially withhold social trust from a rival's AI yet still assimilate its arguments; origin labeling and transparency requirements alone may offer weak protection against foreign influence operations conducted through conversational AI.

Ningzhi Liu, Yannic Hinrichs, Jonas R. Kunst

Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Norway · Department of Communication and Culture, BI Norwegian Business School, Norway

Trust in AI Political Communication

May 20, 2026

Detecting Synthetic Political Narratives in Cross-Platform Social Media Discourse

The proliferation of large language models has introduced a new paradigm of synthetic political communication in which narratives may be generated, semantically coordinated, and strategically disseminated across platforms at scale. We present a cross-platform framework for detecting synthetic political narratives using four coordination signals -- lexical diversity D(C), temporal burstiness B(C), rhetorical repetition R(C), and semantic homogenization H(C) -- combined into a Synthetic Narrative Coordination Score SNC(C). We apply the framework to a corpus of 353,223 records spanning six geopolitical event windows collected from six Telegram channels and nine Reddit communities (2023--2026). Results show that IntelSlava exhibits the lowest lexical diversity (MATTR 0.52--0.54), the highest burstiness (B=+0.48 to +0.73), and the highest rhetorical overlap with peer channels (Jaccard 0.12), ranking first in the composite SNC(C) on four of six event windows (SNC 0.45--0.60). Rybar ranks last on all windows despite its high semantic homogenization, because its Russian-language output yields high lexical diversity and near-zero rhetorical Jaccard with English-language channels -- demonstrating that no single indicator is sufficient for coordination detection. Multi-dimensional SNC(C) scoring provides a more robust and interpretable signal than any individual metric.

Despoina Antonakaki, Sotiris Ioannidis

Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology, Vassilika Vouton, Heraklion, Crete, Greece · Technical University of Crete, University Campus, Akrotiri, Chania, Greece

Social Media Analysis Political Discourse Analysis Political Communication

May 15, 2026

Linked Multi-Modal Data on Russian Domestic and Foreign Policy Speeches

This paper introduces a dataset of interlinked multimodal political communications from the Russian government, addressing persistent deficiencies in the availability of social text- and image-based data for authoritarian politics contexts. The dataset comprises two large corpora of official speeches delivered by senior actors within the Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs over multiple decades. For each speech, we provide Russian- and English-language texts, associated images and captions where available, and harmonized metadata including (e.g.) dates, speakers, (geo)locations, and official government content tags. Unique identifiers link images to speeches and align Russian and English versions of the same communication texts. We further augment these linked datasets with validated topical annotations for both speech texts and speech images, which are generated via transformer-based multimodal topic modeling and refined by a Russian politics expert. The resulting data resources support multimodal, multilingual, temporal, and/or spatial analyses of (authoritarian) political communication and offer a valuable testbed for social science research and large language model (LLM) applications in political domains.

Daria Blinova, Gayathri Emuru, Rakesh Emuru +4

University of Delaware, Department of Political Science & International Relations, Newark, DE, USA · University of Delaware, Masters of Science in Data Science Program, Newark, DE, USA · University of Pennsylvania, Department of Political Science, Philadelphia, PA, USA +1

Computational Social Science Political Communication

May 11, 2026

Unpacking the Eye of the Beholder: Social Location, Identity, and the Moving Target of Political Perspectives

Political and social identities structure how people evaluate political information, a finding decades deep in political science and routinely discarded by computational tools that often produce single scores that treat a piece of text, an image, or a video as if it means the same thing to everyone. This paper shows that it does not, and that the difference is consequential. To address this problem, I develop the Perspectivist Visual Political Sentiment (PVPS) classifier, which learns from approximately 82,000 evaluations by 5,575 U.S. adults to predict how audiences defined by political and social identities will evaluate the same image. Unlike standard tools that average systematic disagreement away, PVPS preserves it, returning an evaluative profile that records who agrees, who diverges, and along which identity lines. Applied to several influential studies of visual sentiment, PVPS shows that perceived violence in protest imagery and the emotional mechanisms behind protest image engagement both change substantively once audience identity is taken into account. It follows that what a political image conveys is a moving target, and measuring it requires knowing whom it is moving.

Elena Sirotkina

Center for Data Science New York University

Sentiment Analysis Computational Social Science Political Communication

Apr 28, 2026

Fake Plastic Voters: When Political Parties Can Use AI-Simulated Focus Groups

Political parties strive to understand their electorates, and focus groups are a vital tool in these efforts. AI-enhanced simulation technologies (AESTs) enable synthetic focus groups in a fraction of the time (and cost), raising the question of when and how such simulated evidence can be used in campaign research. This paper develops a decision matrix to help party strategists match research needs to appropriate simulation technologies and to identify when to escalate to hybrid or fully human focus groups. The matrix combines three dimensions: strategic purpose, deployment risk, and empirical grounding of the simulation tool. Strategic purpose is the decisive dimension, as it determines what kind of evidence the focus group is meant to produce: observing how political meanings and identities emerge through interaction (Mode 1) or testing and refining campaign messages (Mode 2). The matrix shows that, given documented failure modes such as sycophancy, persona drift, and the suppression of minority viewpoints, AESTs cannot replace human interaction in Mode 1 at any risk level. Within Mode 2, suitability depends instead on deployment risk and on the empirical grounding. Yet even here, we caution that routine reliance on AESTs may erode the qualitative craft on which sound judgment depends.

Claudio Novelli, Javier Argota Sanchez-Vaquerizo, Jennifer Cyr +4

Digital Ethics Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA · Department of Legal Studies, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy · Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences (GESS), ETH Zürich, Switzerland +3

Human Behavior Simulation Human-AI Decision Making Political Communication User Simulation

Apr 19, 2026

Does Welsh media need a review? Detecting bias in Nation.Cymru's political reporting

Wales' political landscape has been marked by growing accusations of bias in Welsh media. This paper takes the first computational step toward testing those claims by examining Nation.Cymru, a prominent Welsh political news outlet. I use a two-stage natural language processing (NLP) pipeline: (1) a robustly optimized BERT approach (RoBERTa) bias detector for efficient bias discovery and (2) a large language model (LLM) for target-attributed sentiment classification of bias labels from (1). A primary analysis of 15,583 party mentions across 2022-2026 news articles finds that Reform UK attracts biased framing at twice the rate of Plaid Cymru and over three times as negative in mean sentiment (p<0.001). A secondary analysis across four parties across both news and opinion articles shows that Plaid Cymru is the outlier, receiving markedly more favourable framing than any other party. These findings provide evidence of measurable differential framing in a single Welsh political media outlet, supporting calls for a broader review of Welsh media coverage. Furthermore, the two-stage pipeline offers a low-cost, replicable framework for extending this analysis to other Welsh outlets, as well as media ecosystems outside of Wales.

Cai Parry-Jones

University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Political Communication

Apr 1, 2026

Multimodal Analysis of State-Funded News Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War on YouTube Shorts

YouTube Shorts have become central to news consumption on the platform, yet research on how geopolitical events are represented in this format remains limited. To address this gap, we present a multimodal pipeline that combines automatic transcription, aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), and semantic scene classification. The pipeline is first assessed for feasibility and then applied to analyze short-form coverage of the Israel-Hamas war by state-funded outlets. Using over 2,300 conflict-related Shorts and more than 94,000 visual frames, we systematically examine war reporting across major international broadcasters. Our findings reveal that the sentiment expressed in transcripts regarding specific aspects differs across outlets and over time, whereas scene-type classifications reflect visual cues consistent with real-world events. Notably, smaller domain-adapted models outperform large transformers and even LLMs for sentiment analysis, underscoring the value of resource-efficient approaches for humanities research. The pipeline serves as a template for other short-form platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram, and demonstrates how multimodal methods, combined with qualitative interpretation, can characterize sentiment patterns and visual cues in algorithmically driven video environments.

Daniel Miehling, Sandra Kuebler

Indiana University

Political Communication Social Media Analysis

Mar 28, 2026

The Hidden Costs of AI-Mediated Political Outreach: Persuasion and AI Penalties in the US and UK

As AI-enabled systems become available for political campaign outreach, an important question has received little empirical attention: how do people evaluate the communicative practices these systems represent, and what consequences do those evaluations carry? Most research on AI-enabled persuasion examines attitude change under enforced exposure, leaving aside whether people regard AI-mediated outreach as legitimate or not. We address this gap with a preregistered 2x2 experiment conducted in the United States and United Kingdom (N = 1,800 per country) varying outreach intent (informational vs.~persuasive) and type of interaction partner (human vs.~AI-mediated) in the context of political issues that respondents consider highly important. We find consistent evidence for two evaluation penalties. A persuasion penalty emerges across nearly all outcomes in both countries: explicitly persuasive outreach is evaluated as less acceptable, more threatening to personal autonomy, less beneficial, and more damaging to organizational trust than informational outreach, consistent with reactance to perceived threats to attitudinal freedom. An AI penalty is consistent with a distinct mechanism: AI-mediated outreach triggers normative concerns about appropriate communicative agents, producing similarly negative evaluations across five outcomes in both countries. As automated outreach becomes more widespread, how people judge it may matter for democratic communication just as much as whether it changes minds.

Andreas Jungherr, Adrian Rauchfleisch

University of Bamberg · National Taiwan University

Political Communication Trust in AI

Mar 27, 2026

Clash of the models: Comparing performance of BERT-based variants for generic news frame detection

Framing continues to remain one of the most extensively applied theories in political communication. Developments in computation, particularly with the introduction of transformer architecture and more so with large language models (LLMs), have naturally prompted scholars to explore various novel computational approaches, especially for deductive frame detection, in recent years. While many studies have shown that different transformer models outperform their preceding models that use bag-of-words features, the debate continues to evolve regarding how these models compare with each other on classification tasks. By placing itself at this juncture, this study makes three key contributions: First, it comparatively performs generic news frame detection and compares the performance of five BERT-based variants (BERT, RoBERTa, DeBERTa, DistilBERT and ALBERT) to add to the debate on best practices around employing computational text analysis for political communication studies. Second, it introduces various fine-tuned models capable of robustly performing generic news frame detection. Third, building upon numerous previous studies that work with US-centric data, this study provides the scholarly community with a labelled generic news frames dataset based on the Swiss electoral context that aids in testing the contextual robustness of these computational approaches to framing analysis.

Vihang Jumle

Political Communication Transformer

Mar 18, 2026

Large-Scale Analysis of Persuasive Content on Moltbook

We present an NLP-based study of political propaganda on Moltbook, a Reddit-style platform for AI agents. To enable large-scale analysis, we develop LLM-based classifiers to detect political propaganda, validated against expert annotation (Cohen's

κ

= 0.64-0.74). Using a dataset of 673,127 posts and 879,606 comments, we find that political propaganda accounts for 1% of all posts and 42% of all political content. These posts are concentrated in a small set of communities, with 70% of such posts falling into five of them. 4% of agents produced 51% of these posts. We further find that a minority of these agents repeatedly post highly similar content within and across communities. Despite this, we find limited evidence that comments amplify political propaganda.

Julia Jose, Meghna Manoj Nair, Rachel Greenstadt

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, New York University, New York, NY, USA

Large Language Model-Based Text Classification Political Discourse Analysis Political Communication Social Media Analysis Computational Social Science

Mar 14, 2026

SemEval-2026 Task 6: CLARITY -- Unmasking Political Question Evasions

Political speakers often avoid answering questions directly while maintaining the appearance of responsiveness. Despite its importance for public discourse, such strategic evasion remains underexplored in Natural Language Processing. We introduce SemEval-2026 Task 6, CLARITY, a shared task on political question evasion consisting of two subtasks: (i) clarity-level classification into Clear Reply, Ambivalent, and Clear Non-Reply, and (ii) evasion-level classification into nine fine-grained evasion strategies. The benchmark is constructed from U.S. presidential interviews and follows an expert-grounded taxonomy of response clarity and evasion. The task attracted 124 registered teams, who submitted 946 valid runs for clarity-level classification and 539 for evasion-level classification. Results show a substantial gap in difficulty between the two subtasks: the best system achieved 0.89 macro-F1 on clarity classification, surpassing the strongest baseline by a large margin, while the top evasion-level system reached 0.68 macro-F1, matching the best baseline. Overall, large language model prompting and hierarchical exploitation of the taxonomy emerged as the most effective strategies, with top systems consistently outperforming those that treated the two subtasks independently. CLARITY establishes political response evasion as a challenging benchmark for computational discourse analysis and highlights the difficulty of modeling strategic ambiguity in political language.

Konstantinos Thomas, Giorgos Filandrianos, Maria Lymperaiou +2

National Technical University of Athens · Instituto de Telecomunicações · Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa +1

Political Discourse Analysis Political Communication

Mar 10, 2026

Benchmarking Political Persuasion Risks Across Frontier Large Language Models

Concerns persist regarding the capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to sway political views. Although prior research has claimed that LLMs are not more persuasive than standard political campaign practices, the recent rise of frontier models warrants further study. In two survey experiments (N=19,145) across bipartisan issues and stances, we evaluate seven state-of-the-art LLMs developed by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI. We find that LLMs outperform standard campaign advertisements, with heterogeneity in performance across models. Specifically, Claude models exhibit the highest persuasiveness, while Grok exhibits the lowest. The results are robust across issues and stances. Moreover, in contrast to the findings in Hackenburg et al. (2025b) and Lin et al. (2025) that information-based prompts boost persuasiveness, we find that the effectiveness of information-based prompts is model-dependent: they increase the persuasiveness of Claude and Grok while substantially reducing that of GPT. We introduce a data-driven and strategy-agnostic LLM-assisted conversation analysis approach to identify and assess underlying persuasive strategies. Our work benchmarks the persuasive risks of frontier models and provides a framework for cross-model comparative risk assessment.

Zhongren Chen, Joshua Kalla, Quan Le

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Statistics & Data Science, Yale University. · Associate Professor, Departments of Political Science and Statistics & Data Science, Yale University.

Persuasion in Language Models Political Communication LLM Safety Benchmarks

Feb 20, 2026

Perceived Political Bias in LLMs Reduces Persuasive Abilities

Conversational AI has been proposed as a scalable way to correct public misconceptions and spread misinformation. Yet its effectiveness may depend on perceptions of its political neutrality. As LLMs enter partisan conflict, elites increasingly portray them as ideologically aligned. We test whether these credibility attacks reduce LLM-based persuasion. In a preregistered U.S. survey experiment (N=2144), participants completed a three-round conversation with ChatGPT about a personally held economic policy misconception. Compared to a neutral control, a short message indicating that the LLM was biased against the respondent's party attenuated persuasion by 28%. Transcript analysis indicates that the warnings alter the interaction: respondents push back more and engage less receptively. These findings suggest that the persuasive impact of conversational AI is politically contingent, constrained by perceptions of partisan alignment.

Matthew DiGiuseppe, Joshua Robison

Institute of Political Science Leiden University

Persuasion in Language Models Political Bias in Language Models Political Communication

Feb 15, 2022

Media Slant is Contagious

This paper examines the diffusion of media slant. We document the influence of Fox News Channel (FNC) on the partisan slant of local newspapers in the U.S. over the years 1995-2008. We measure the political slant of local newspapers by scaling the news article texts to Republicans' and Democrats' speeches in Congress. Using channel positioning as an instrument for viewership, we find that higher FNC viewership causes local newspapers to adopt more right-wing slant. The effect emerges gradually, only several years after FNC's introduction, mirroring the channel's growing influence on voting behaviour. A main driver of the shift in newspaper slant appears to be a change in local political preferences.

Philine Widmer, Clémentine Abed Meraim, Sergio Galletta +1

Paris School of Economics · ETH Zürich

Political Communication