What issues do parties pay the most attention to? Applause patterns systematically correlate with issue ownership. (5/6)

Besides party unity and exclusion, modelling applause also allows us to analyse important patterns of Ideological (dis)agreement and electoral cycle effects. (4/6)

Examining pooled party dyads, applause serves as a marker for party unity (diagonal line) and political exclusion (when the far-right AfD speaks, other parties applaud rarely). (3/6)

In our analysis, we utilise more than 750,000 instances of applause spanning over 40 years of speeches in the German Bundestag. (2/6)

👏Applause offers a revealing lens on party competition! In a recent article @wepsocial.bsky.social (w/@jocmuel.bsky.social+@pluggedchris.bsky.social), we study how applause reflects party and coalition unity, ideological agreement, political exclusion, issue ownership, and the electoral cycle! (1/6)

I'm at #APSA25! On Saturday at 2 pm (Panel "Seeing is Believing: Innovations and Applications in Image Data Analysis"), I'll present a new project with @chrisguarnold.bsky.social, Oliver Rittmann, and @smtorres.bsky.social in which we quantitatively measure media slant based on news article images.

The figure illustrating MPs' interest in seeking dialogical interaction does not seem to be displayed properly in the thread. Here it is again:

🔗 We test the robustness of our findings by including various further explanations such as gender, seniority, and mandate type.

💡 As expected, our results show a significant correlation of attempting to invite MPs with increasing ideological distance (Stage 1). However, these attempts also get declined with a higher probability (Stage 2). We only find tentative evidence for government-opposition effects in Stage 2.

Descriptive insights of all 14,595 attempted and successful interventions draw a fine-grained picture across legislative periods and parties. Notably, there was a significant increase in declined interventions in the 19th legislative period, which was the first w/ the far-right AfD in the Bundestag.

👥 We test these expectations on the empirical case of interventions in the German Bundestag (1990-2020). Interventions force MPs to follow a set of formal procedures when seeking and avoiding discursive interactions, which enables us to study these decision-making processes.

📨 We expect diverging ideological preferences and government-opposition dynamics to be decisive guiding principles for MPs evaluating the risks and opportunities associated with a) extending invitations and refraining from doing so, as well as b) accepting and declining them.

🚀 Our paper (with @eliaskoch.bsky.social) on ‘The Politics of Seeking and Avoiding Discourse in Parliament’ is finally out as EarlyView at the EJPR!

🎥 In our first case study, we showcase that multimodal #alignment helps to predict the tone of 2020 US election video ads. Our second case study uses #alignment to demonstrate the potential of cross-modal queries in analyzing how German MPs address the radical-right AfD. (3/4)

🚀 New working paper with @chrisguarnold.bsky.social on the power of analyzing #multimodal #politicalcommunication (text/audio/video/...) to capture the richness of human interaction more comprehensively. We need #alignment to make the most of multimodal data. 🧵 (1/4)

For this, we analyze the paper and appendix of 64 machine learning related manuscripts in APSR, Political Analysis, and PSRM: (2/3)