Publications & Projects
Below please find a selection of my current research projects and a list of my publications.
Under (Spatial) Pressure: Party-Level Strategies for Topical Negative Campaigning in a Multidimensional Political Space (under review)
with Jasmin Riedl and Johannes Steup
This paper delves into the relationship between spatial pressure and topical negative campaigning by parties during the 2021 German federal election. Focusing on four primary issue areas – economic, ecological, cultural, and Covid-19 – we question whether parties under substantial spatial pressure (those sharing significant voter bases with rivals) in a specific issue area tend to launch more attacks. Furthermore, we examine if these attacks predominantly target their immediate competitors. Employing natural language processing, we analyze 166,402 tweets from 1,228 official party accounts. We introduce an innovative metric for spatial pressure. Our findings indicate that as spatial pressure escalates, the frequency of economic and ecological attacks rises, but cultural and Covid-19 related attacks diminish. Notably, while parties tend to target direct competitors on economic and cultural fronts, this trend wanes for ecological and Covid-19 issues. The research underscores the pivotal role of issue dimensionality and party strategy in dictating the tenor of negative campaigning. It suggests that the influence of spatial pressure on topical negative campaigning is contingent on the specific issue at hand.
The Evolution of Echo Chambers Across Time and Issues: A Longitudinal Analysis of German Twitter Chatter Comparing Three Crises
with Jasmin Riedl and Andreas Dafnos
The study explores short- and long-term echo chamber effects in the German language Twittersphere and across three issues: Covid-19 discussions in 2021, the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis, and the 2022 Russo-Ukranian War. Specifically, we ask whether echo chambers addressing a single issue are stable over time, and whether they can persist across equally contentious, time independent events. Our study reveals that echo chambers are evident and remain stable over a short four-week period among opposing communities discussing Covid-19 in 2021 and the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022. However, in the case of the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis, cross-cutting exposure is more prominent, indicating an absence of echo chambers. We also observe a strong overlap of regular users in the Covid-19 and Russo-Ukrainian War discussions, with users supporting pandemic containment measures also backing Ukraine, and those opposing measures supporting the Russian narrative of the war. Nevertheless, we find that long-term echo chamber effects diminish as the temporal distance between events increases, as seen in the difference in user composition between discussions on the Syrian refugee crisis and the other two topics. We therefore conclude that echo chambers can be maintained by crises that address conceptually different issues --- they are attitude-driven instead of issue-specific.
Battle of Words: Dynamics of Echo Chambers among European Elites during War Times
with Hilke Brockmann, Daniel Triana, Joris Frese and Pedro Fierro Zamora
Echo chambers are one of the most broadly studied and critically viewed phenomena in (digital) political communication. There is plenty of (often conflicting) evidence about their causes, prevalence, and consequences. However, two aspects of echo chambers are not well understood: (1) their prevalence among political elites who are experts in public communication: Many studies have researched echo chambers in the broader population, but little is known about whether parliamentarians and other politicians are similarly trapped in them or if they strategically generate them; (2) their dynamics over time: Echo chambers are often described as static and binary. Studies look at whether they exist or not, who participates in them, and who doesn´t. We instead approach echo chambers as a fluid phenomenon that can emerge, dissolve, and change rapidly over short periods of time and encompass one group at one time, and another later. In order to fill these two gaps in the literature, we study the political online communication of European elites during the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war. We expect the military shock to disrupt the political discourse of elites. We analyze a sample of all the Tweets sent by members of the European Parliament and the European Commission between October 2021 and July 2022 (N = 520.871). The chosen time frame allows us to investigate whether selective attention among and polarization between political elites have changed as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which centered much of the debate on Twitter on a single topic for several months. Analytically, we work with the BERTopic sentence transformer model all-MiniLM-L6-v2, which is trained on over a billion sentences and specifically designed for the analysis of short paragraphs, and thus ideal for Twitter data. First results confirm that political elites increased their communication output immediately after February 24, 2022 and politicians began to sort themselves into demarcated thematic clusters.
Traditional after all? ‘Protective-conservative’ attitudes among populist right and Green supporters on (seemingly) non-partisan issues
with Julia Schulte-Cloos
Scholars concerned with understanding the growing salience of the cultural dimension of politics agree that the New Right and the New Left are divided by their positions related to questions such as immigration, European integration, minority rights, or the environment. While previous scholarship has convincingly demonstrated that party positions of populist right and Green parties are indeed characterized by a sharp cleavage on such issues, it has neglected the similarity of the two political opponents when it comes to the ‘protective-conservative’ attitudes of their core constituencies. Integrating socio-psychological theories of attitude formation with accounts on political conflict in Western Europe, we contend that populist right and Green partisans display similar, seemingly non-partisan preferences to preserve ways of living, protect local communities, and cultural ideas. To test our argument, we draw on a novel text corpus that contains discursive data from all Twitter followers of the German Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen), the populist radical-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and more than 500 political representatives of the two political parties, both at the national and the state level. Relying on a Naïve Bayesian classifier, we first demonstrate that the two groups of partisans show great similarities on issues related to ‘preserving-conservatism’: the discourse related to questions of lifestyle of health and sustainability, agriculture and spatial development, as well as community responses to global challenges, is similar enough that the algorithm cannot successfully predict the partisan group of the respective sender. We cross-validate our findings with linear Support Vector Machines. Based on a set of dictionaries, we also show, however, that both groups differ markedly in articulating a diverse set of responses when seeing their traditional visions of lifestyles challenged. The results of our study have important implications for our understanding of the role of new cultural politics in seemingly non-partisan domains.
Publications:
Drews, W. (2022). E-Expression in a Comparative Perspective: Contextual Drivers and Constraints of Online Political Expression. Political Research Exchange 4(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/2474736X.2022.2083520
Drews, W., Müller, A., Neumeier, A., Riedl, J., & Steup, J. (2022). Twitter Accounts of the Candidates in the 2022 German State Election of North Rhine-Westphalia. Data File Version 1.0.0. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7802/2468
Müller, A., Riedl, J., & Drews, W. (2022). Real-Time Stance Detection and Issue Analysis of the 2021 German Federal Election Campaign on Twitter. In M. Janssen et al. (Eds), Electronic Government, EGOV 2022, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 13391 (pp. 125-146). Cham: Springer. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15086-9_9
Ceron, A., Curini, L., & Drews, W. (2022). Short-Term Issue Emphasis on Twitter During the 2017 German Election: A Comparison of the Economic Left-Right and Socio-Cultural Dimensions. German Politics. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2020.1836161
Brockmann, H., Drews, W., & Torpey, J. (2021). A Class for Itself? On the World Views of the New Tech Elite. PLoS ONE 16(1): e0244071. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244071
Drews, W. (2020). Digital Politics Across Contexts, Social Media, Parties and Citizens: Technological Opportunities and Challenges in Modern Democracies. [Doctoral dissertation, European University Institute]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2870/188696
Riedl, J., Drews, W., Jager, A., & Kurze, K. (2016). Krisen- und Risikokommunikation bei Hochwasser- und Unwetterereignissen. ZA6440 Datenfile Version 1.0.0. Köln: GESIS Datenarchiv.
Jager, A., Riedl, J., Kurze, K., & Drews, W. (2016). Krisen- und Risikokommunikation im Baulichen Bevölkerungsschutz. Mehr als ein rationaler Diskurs. 2. aktualisierte Auflage. Neubiberg: Universität der Bundeswehr München.
Drews, W., Jager, A., & Kurze, K. (2016). Das Hochwasser in Deutschland 2013. Eine qualitative Analyse der Krisen- und Risikokommunikation. Neubiberg: Universität der Bundeswehr München.
Drews, W., Jager, A., & Münch, U. (2015). Paradigmenwechsel im Hochwasserschutz: Die europäische Hochwasserrisikomanagement-Richtlinie und ihre Umsetzung in der BRD. In Europäisches Zentrum für Föderalismus-Forschung Tübingen (Ed.), Jahrbuch des Föderalismus 2015 (458-472). Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Drews, W., Jager, A., & Münch, U. (2014). Land (und Föderalismus) unter? Chancen und Grenzen des Hochwasserschutzes im föderalen System der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. In Europäisches Zentrum für Föderalismus-Forschung Tübingen (Ed.), Jahrbuch des Föderalismus 2014 (159-173). Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Drews, W. (2013). A Functional Perspective on Post-Communist Civil Society: Contentious Activities and Internet Activism in Latvia. Abgerufen über: http://cbs.ut.ee/index.php/current/defended