Marvin Stecker

Really excited that after several years of working on it, revising, and getting lots of rejections, our paper (w/ Rune Stubager & Mads Thau) on citizens’ responses to group appeals is *finally* out @ejprjournal.bsky.social

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

A 🧵 on our findings...

Picture of the committee, from left to right. Annie, Nicola, Azade, Eva, and Hajo.

Proud to congratulate you, @azadekakavand.bsky.social, on your PhD defense –
“Technology Affordances, Social Media Platforms & the Networked Far Right.”
A remarkable achievement that combines years of hard work & building of skills that you now use at @bredowinstitut.bsky.social. Missing u already🥳

Group photo: The CCL team standing together outdoors with the mountains around Dienten an Hochkönig in Salzburg in the background, smiling at the camera.

Ski lift: A line of orange ski lift chairs stretching up a green slope surrounded by dense forest to get up the mountain.

Hiking trail: The CCL team hiking down a narrow trail across a sunlit mountain slope with autumn-colored vegetation.

Mountain view: A wide view of mountain peaks and ridges around Dienten am Hochkönig in Salzburg, with low-hanging clouds drifting between the valleys under a blue sky.

Every strong team needs time to pause, reset, and grow together. #TeamRetreat #DientenAmHochkönig

After an hour’s delay, you’ll get 25%, with two hours, 50% back from Deutsche Bahn. Doesn’t make up for the inconvenience, but it’s at least something…

Ever asked yourself how to detect and extract social groups from texts with computational social science? @haukelicht.bsky.social and me have a solution for you out at @bjpols.bsky.social. You can also find the pre-trained models on huggingface!

Danke, danke! Hat sich ein Non-Diss Projekt mal ausgezahlt :D

Thanks!

What are our takeaways?
- Genuinely great breadth of tool development!
- These don’t agree, however, when applied to the same text
- Rather than criticising any single tool, we hope this is a benchmark and motivation to develop a more holistic, transparent and reflective approach to study morality

Regression table for all foundations on English translated manifestos, with the different effect directions for each measurement instrument. They often don't converge.

So what about it? Predicting parties’ use of moral foundations from their ideology, the measurements would lead you to different conclusions. Sometimes this concerns only significance, but with others, you will even get different effect directions.

Correlations between original language and English-translated measurements. For CCR with different types of embeddings, these are rather high, as well as for DDR, whereas the MFD has noticeably lower values.

We also compared the measurements on the original-language and English-translated manifestos. Dictionaries seem the hardest to translate. With all embedding-based measurements, their outputs are more similar, which is overall encouraging, though we also find some lower correlations here.

A heatmap of Kendall's correlations between all applied tools, with mostly rather low correlations.

What did we find? Considering the same English-language text, the measurements don’t really agree on how much a certain moral foundation is present. Most correlations between approaches are low, max 0.2 and 0.3.

A table that shows the tools we analysed in the study. We considered the MFD and MFD2 dictionaries, the eMFD, and also applied DDR, CCR and MoralBERT models. Links and citations for all are in the paper.

What tools?
We looked at the most common, off-the-shelf methods to measure different moral foundations (such as care, sanctity) in texts.
Where did we look?
All 800+ manifestos from the Manifesto Project in Spanish, English, Dutch or German, and their English translations.

New publication, out in Political Analysis:

There is an increasing array of tools to measure facets of morality in political language. But while they ostensibly measure the same concept, do they actually?

I and @fhopp.bsky.social set out to see what happens.

🚨 Neue Veröffentlichung! 🚨

Im sogenannten “Election Report” schauen wir uns die Nationalratswahl 2024 nochmal aus wissenschaftlicher Perspektive an und bereiten sie mit aktuellen Daten auf 🇦🇹🗳️🤝

📄 Lest hier: doi.org/10.1080/0140...

If you've recently wondered "What happened in Austria's last federal election" (and a lot happened!), we've got you covered:

I've never felt such accomplishments as my Docker scripts running on another persons machine using only my horrible readme file to guide them.

Really happy to see my work with @dweisstanner.bsky.social published with @bjpols.bsky.social. In this letter, we look at symbolic class signalling through cultural consumption and how effective it is across voters of different parties.

A thread 👇 (1/n)

#OpenAccess - cup.org/3GSCIKV

Thinking about using #CSS methods to study #racism, #stereotypes or #hate speech in text? 📐

👉 Check out my first dissertation paper co-authored by @fabiennelind.bsky.social and @hajoboo.bsky.social just published in Annals of the ICA! @icahdq.bsky.social 🥳

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/annc...

This is the only score I shall ever share because it was easy and I suck at this game
and my Fantasy-F1 predictions were absolutely rubbish and don’t we all deserve a tiny bit of happiness sometimes
maybe God or fate acts through puzzle apps

Connections
Puzzle #756
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟪🟪🟪🟪

dark blue background. on it, there is text saying "The Delegated Act on 40.4 DATA ACCESS is here", "Delegated Act on 40.4 DATA ACCESS" is yellow, the other text is white.

📢 Big news for platform researchers across Europe and beyond:

Today, the @ec.europa.eu adopted the Delegated Act for Article 40 of the Digital Services Act (DSA) – a long-anticipated milestone enabling researchers to request access to non-public platform data under Article 40.4.

Thrilled to share that this study, which I started back in 2021, has finally been published! 🎉 While topic modeling may not be the most cutting-edge anymore, the discussion on validation & standardization is still highly relevant. Proud of this work & contribution! 🙌📚
doi.org/10.1017/psrm...

Does anyone like data wrangling?

Doing important things at @epsanet.bsky.social …like locating the one veg canapé at the reception 👀
@stawi-univie.bsky.social
@bseisl.bsky.social
@mkaltenegger.bsky.social
@alexanderdalheimer.bsky.social
@marvins.bsky.social
@elenaheinz.bsky.social
@mascakir.bsky.social
@thomasmmeyer.bsky.social

If you’re stressed with planning conferences, we’ve basically got a paper for every slot ;)
#EPSA2025

🥳 Huge congrats to our @veronikaebner.bsky.social, @ruzza13.bsky.social, and @moritzsedlatschek.bsky.social on successfully defending their PhD project proposals today! ✨
Great studies ahead 👀
#CSS #polcom

Ich fürchte, das ist ein you Problem, zumindest nicht Uni Wien? Glückwunsch zur Publication!

Screenshot of the abstract of the article.

🚨 NEW PUBLICATION! Who belongs to “the people” – and who does not?

What a great way to start the week. I’m really happy that my article on populist in- and outgroup references is now out in @polstudies.bsky.social #openaccess 🔓

doi.org/10.1177/0032...

🧵 1/10

From text-as-data to sleep data collection, this year‘s #hackica25 in Boulder, CO, was a blast and we‘re proud to say that we‘ve (again) successfully hacked communication science. Thanks to all participants and see y‘all at #ica25 ✨

Today I was lucky enough to present my master‘s thesis on climate solutions journalism in the same panel at #ica25 as Kathryn Thier, who I cited so much in my thesis 😁
Great to see so many interesting presentations on environmental journalism 🌱
📸 @hdnrch.bsky.social

between that, Google Images being created because of Jennifer Lopez's v revealing green dress and Facebook's prototype being used to rate students' attractiveness, it really is quite striking and grim just how much of the modern internet was created by and for sleazy men