The changes in the media environment brought up by digital media are expected to have profound effects on politics, from citizen’s participation to elites’ strategies. However, the literature has paid little attention to systemic and contextual factors that might constrain or limit the possibilities for collective action in this new communication context. Using a structural approach, I analyze presidential election campaigns’ use of Twitter in a study of 16 Latin American countries between 2012 and 2015 – Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela. To demonstrate the quality of the data set, I show that forecasting models with Twitter Volume can preview election results in most of the cases, and even give more accurate forecasting than polling data in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Mexico. In order to fill the shortage of theoretical models on social media, I propose a new concept of campaign spheres for understanding the linkage between social media messages and public opinion associated with campaigns. Campaign spheres are sections of the public sphere. Instead of forming public opinion through rational deliberation, a campaign sphere mostly reproduces a candidate’s political slogans and symbols to mobilize opinion leaders. While the public sphere is inclusive, a campaign sphere has clear boundaries dividing those who support the campaign and those who oppose it. Institutions and social context do affect campaign spheres in Latin American presidential elections. Party systems can predict how intensely people participate, while incumbency increases the number of participants, mainly in left-wing campaign spheres. Two-round systems had a negative impact on the participation of right-wing campaign spheres, and also demonstrated a small negative effect on the prestige of all candidates. Yet challengers had more prestige than incumbents – an effect that was stronger in plurality system countries and after the elections. This research gives a perspective on the constrained context for communication change in Latin America, which can be extended and generalized to other new democracies.

When protests are successful, they force us to realize another world is possible. To be successful they have to communicate their message effectively and be persuasive. News coverage can often determine whether a protest will be successful or unsuccessful at amplifying its message and persuading audiences.

This dissertation examines the relationship of news organizations and protest movements. It asks three primary research questions. First, how does news attention to a protest rise and fall over time? Second, do news organizations pay attention to the causes and grievances of protesters? Third, how does news framing of a protest change over time? To answer these questions, I develop a theoretical model, the protest news framing cycle, and present the results of a longitudinal analysis of news attention and framing of protest movements.

To identify the frame-changing dynamic occurring over time, I conducted a content analysis of the news coverage of Occupy Wall Street and the G20 protests in London, Pittsburgh and Toronto. The study identifies longitudinal changes in news frames about the substantive issues of a protest and the conflict that ensues between protesters and city officials during a protest. Findings suggest that conflict has a significant impact on the number of news stories about protests. Further, the results demonstrate how news framing opportunities change as a movement reaches different stages of the news attention cycle. The cases studied here illustrate that when the protests grew, journalists focused on the protesters' grievances, including economic inequality, bank bailouts, ending the Iraq War, and climate change. As the movements peaked, news attention shifted to the intensifying conflict between city officials and protesters. Ultimately, prolonged conflict is typically followed by a decline in protest news interest.

These results reveal the small window of opportunity protesters have to attract public support before news attention wanes and underscore the importance of protester tactics in shaping the narratives of coverage. Protesters have to strategically weigh the costs of confrontational tactics because such tactics can elicit more news attention to the protest, but these tactics might overshadow the core message of the protest itself.

In 2000, campaign web sites served mainly reinforcing functions for supporters of candidates, rather than serving to mobilize non-voters or assist undecided voters in making electoral choices. Most people visiting political web sites are politically knowledgeable and have fairly strong candidate preferences from the outset in favor of the sponsor of the web site. A majority of visitors to candidates' sites return for subsequent visits following their first.

What explains civic engagement in China? China lacks many factors traditionally theorized by scholars to explain cooperative behavior in civic engagement. China has constrained formal opportunities for political participation and the absence of a public sphere. Additionally, it lacks the well-developed institutional structures of civil society organizations, such as the presence of NGOs.This study seeks to investigate whether social media – as a form of informal institution – play a key role in civic engagement in China. The study begins with the insight that online social network ties may lead to cooperative behaviors of Chinese citizens in civic engagement. I argue that social media may have differential impacts on civic engagement, depending on whether such platforms are conducive to maintaining social network ties. Furthermore, online relationships may be mediated by offline relationships in social media use and civic engagement. I test my hypotheses using large-N analysis and develop regression models using a dataset on social media and public opinion in China. There are three main findings. First, social media designed to maintain social network ties and increase their customer base through network ties seem to have a positive impact on civic engagement. Conversely, social media designed for entertainment and instant gratification tends to have no impact or even negative impact on civic engagement. Second, the more people interact online with people whom they know offline, the more likely they will be engaged in civic activities. Third, the closer the offline relationship is, the more civic engagement interests there will be.  

A great deal is known about individual-level phenomena that harm the quality of engagement in the public sphere, such as perceptions of exposure to disinformation, actual exposure to false content, sharing of false news stories online, distrust towards the news media, news literacy, or individual perception of news quality and credibility. Some studies also consider those concepts and their incidence at the system-level. However, this literature remains highly US-centric and has tended to treat these concepts separately: as studies of news, or of social media, or of disinformation, or of trust in information. What connects these phenomena is epistemic in nature. With recent scholarship showing epistemic threats arise in the absence of outright falsehoods, the need for a more encompassing framework becomes ever more pressing. This dissertation integrates the literature on these epistemic problems by treating the problem of disinformation, distrust in the media and feelings of disorientation as distinct dimensions of a single, broader concept: epistemic vulnerability. This concept more accurately capture the broader phenomenon of the eroding authority and value traditionally attributed to political information. This dissertation investigates this novel construct, epistemic vulnerability, from two angles: the global trend towards more hyperpartisan media, and system-level vulnerability. I ask the following questions. How can we differentiate hyper-partisan news outlets that contribute to epistemic vulnerability from moderately partisan or responsible “mainstream” news? How do levels of epistemic vulnerability vary across Western democracies? What is the relationship between the structure of political and media systems and levels of epistemic vulnerability? Chapter 2 introduces a new approach for identifying channels that contribute to making news environments more epistemically vulnerable in national contexts outside the US. Using data from the ReCitCom survey project (wave 2022), I propose audience-level metrics that can detect abnormally partisan news audiences cross-nationally, relying on two indicators: ideological lean and bias in voting behavior. I test this approach on the French media ecosystem and find that the audience of CNEWS, a major 24/7 news channel, is much more ideologically radical compared to other French news audience. I also find that it is disproportionately supportive of the far right in national elections. Comparatively, CNEWS and Fox News are equivalent in terms of ideological lean, and the voting bias in favor of the far right is actually more pronounced in the case of CNEWS. In conjunction with its track record of violating French media rules, these indicators suggest that CNEWS engages in problematic behavior analogous to Fox News in the United States. Chapter 3 integrates the literature on epistemic problems and builds the theoretical framework for epistemic vulnerability and articulates the relationship between disinformation, feelings of disorientation and distrust towards the professional news media. Chapter 4 presents the Epistemic Vulnerability (EV) Index, a tool for quantifying the health of news environments in a comparative manner. The study employs Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression models to explore the relationship between epistemic vulnerability and various structural characteristics of political and media systems. The results indicate that Northern European countries demonstrate higher epistemic resilience, while the United States, Spain, and Eastern European countries exhibit greater vulnerability. The study confirms the significant role of factors such as populism, ideological polarization, political parallelism, public media viewership, and the size of party systems in influencing epistemic resilience or vulnerability. Chapter 5 reflects on the findings and their implications for future research and policy. It critiques the "Pulitzer Prize Syndrome" in journalism research, emphasizing the importance of considering variations in national contexts and the impact of public broadcasting and media regulations.

The digital era has ushered in a new collective action landscape that scholars are now trying to

understand. To date, there has been insufficient attention paid to cross-national variation collective action that is driven by digitally mediated thin tie networks rather than formal political organizations. In this dissertation, I propose a theory of cross-national variation in digitally networked collective action (DNCA) and test it empirically through a paired case comparison of Japan and South Korea. I argue that the extent and scale of DNCA is to a large extent a function of citizenship norms, such that the use of digital media and related technologies will have a more transformative effect on collective action in contexts with high aggregate levels of engaged norms, and a less transformative effect in countries with low aggregate levels of engaged norms. I test this theory by looking for differences in the extent to which digitally mediated thin ties, social network size, and social network heterogeneity are conducive to participation in protests, boycotts, and petitions in Japan and South Korea. I evaluate the external validity of the results of the main analyses through a larger-N analysis.

Both scholars and public commentators are rightly concerned about the future of democracy in the US. A coalescing set of phenomena contribute to backsliding and the threat of authoritarianism and even violence. One key contributor is affective polarization, which hamstrings institutions and creates animus among citizens, leading to cascades of problems. Another is racial identity, especially as it leads to a backlash among social conservatives to changing demographics, decades-long advancements in civil rights, and the loss of the cultural dominance they once enjoyed. Racial resentment is tied to many of the array of problems connected to populist and extremist politics in the US. While scholars have developed a rich understanding of polarization and racial identity politics, these phenomena are primarily understood separately. Yet, there are theoretical reasons to expect that these may intersect. The key to the potential intersection of affective polarization and racial resentment is people’s assumptions about race and partisanship, especially about Black Americans. Since the realignment of the South with the Republican Party, the Democratic Party is more strongly associated with civil rights. The public widely assumes Black Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic. For example, in the 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections, over 90% voted for Democratic candidates. With racial and partisan identity linked in people’s minds, the implications for an interesting question about which little is known is the following: Do racial attitudes, including racial resentment, interact with affective polarization, and if so, how? That question motivates this study. Utilizing a randomized survey experiment (n=1126), this study explores the impact of messaging that challenges the assumptions about racial and partisan identities. Ultimately, the experiment produces null statistical results. Finally, I explore the possibilities for the null results and offer suggestions for future research.

The media environment has changed dramatically in recent years. First altered by cable news, which upended the dominance of network news, digital media has in recent years created a media landscape littered with media outlets, from new, ambitious websites like Politico to citizen media sourced on Twitter. It is unclear how or if these changes have changed the relationship between the media and the public; indeed, despite considerable attention from scholars, the interdependencies between media elements such as professional news, blogs, social media, and the public that define the modern media have yet to be unraveled. Instead, several conflicting findings have emerged: some confirm the prevailing media to public agenda setting theory, others find a reverse agenda setting dynamic, while some uncover an interactive series of processes in which diverse elements influence the media and public agendas. I argue that modern agenda setting processes reflect a hybridized media ecosystem, with mutual interdependencies and feedback loops driving agenda creation. I further characterize the issues that are likely to emerge in particular elements and consider the role of partisanship. To test my hypotheses, I analyze longitudinal data on issue attention across five elements of the contemporary media system: survey data, Twitter, key blogs, a record of Google searches within the United States; and top professional news sources. I track attention to 25 issues across a time horizon from January 2010 through December 2013. A lagged time series analysis further identifies issue origin points and trends as issues travel across elements. In order to further illuminate this relationship, I examine three of these issues in more detail by shining a light on the media and public discussions of these issues during periods of canonical attention. I also show how the rise of partisan media has changed the media agenda itself, with the result that different outlets attend to issues at different rates. This dissertation is therefore able to characterize the interdependencies inherent within the system that drive the public and media agendas, challenging some of the assumptions of a generation of minimal effects theories.

Incorporating a significant amount of technology into a classroom is an important, but extremely difficult task. In this paper we describe the next generation of the UCSB digital classroom, called the Collaborative Technologies Lab (CTL). The primary goal of the CTL is to investigate the challenges of deploying technology for technology's sake. We feel that without the ability to deploy a large amount of technology and offer robust functionality, the whole idea of enhanced learning environments becomes marginalized. Therefore, it is critical to understand the challenges of deeply embedding technology in a classroom. Based on experience in building and using the CTL, in this paper we propose a demarcation point between program production and content encoding. This demarcation point offers the advantage of breaking a large technical problem into smaller, easier-to-solve problems. The demarcation point also has the advantage of being able to separate complex functions along common lines of expertise. One skilled in production need not worry about the technology of the encoding systems and one skilled in technology need not worry about the ascetics of program production

College students exploit information technology to cheat on papers and assignments, but for the most part university faculty employ few technological techniques to detect cheating. This paper reports on a trial of software for the detection of cheating in a large undergraduate survey class. The paper discusses the decision to adopt electronic means for screening student papers, the techniques used, the outcome, strategic concerns regarding deterrence versus detection of cheating, and the results of a survey of student attitudes about the experience. The paper advances the thesis that easily-adopted techniques not only close a sophistication gap associated with computerized cheating, but can place faculty in a stronger position than they have ever enjoyed historically with regard to the deterrence and detection of some classes of plagiarism.