At IAS we have established a research environment committed to the study of the dynamics of public discourse based on large-scale computational text analysis. Generously funded by the Swedish Research Council (grant 2018-05170), the project joins computational text analysis specialists focused on methodological innovation with social scientists attuned to social and political dynamics. This makes IAS a unique place for deriving insights into the evolution of political discourse through the use of theoretically driven computational innovations.
In the wake of digitization, social-media platforms, publicly accessible newspaper repositories, and machine-readable political documents, have become digital archives of public sentiment. Our international and interdisciplinary group---with researchers from Linköping University, Aalto University, the University of Lucerne, and the Institut Politechnique de Paris---analyzes such data to mine for the meaning embedded in these texts.
We study the discourse dynamics between politicians, media, and the public to understand meaning making, explore shifts in sentiment, and follow how collectively agreed narratives arise. In particular, we seek to understand the emergence and transformation of the public debate on immigration in Sweden. Our research will provide answers to questions such as:
- How do public discourses on immigration form and change over time?
- What part do social media, traditional media, and political parties play and how do they interact with each other?
- How does opinion polarization occur online and how does misinformation spread?
- How do discourse dynamics in local contexts (e.g. neighborhoods) interact with real-world events (e.g. crime) and social outcomes (e.g. residential segregation)?
Our aim is to understand the processes by which issues surrounding migration and integration are framed by different social groups, media outlets, and political parties, which we hope allows for evidence-based policy recommendations that tackle key challenges of integration.
Read more: Who is setting the discourse on immigration
Project time: January 2019 - open end
