Structuring the Public Debate

Party-Press Alignment and Discursive Polarization in the French Immigration and Climate Change Debate

My master thesis tested whether some of the arguments by Benkler, Farris, and Roberts in their 2018 book "Network Propaganda" hold in media and political systems outside of the US. Bridging literature in comparative media studies, political communication, and political science, I leveraged computational techniques to estimate the discursive polarization levels in France between 2017 and 2019 and its relation to party-press alignment on issue salience. My analysis finds little evidence of polarization in the French media system and scarce proof of a correlation between the two variables.

Supervisors: Prof. Caterina Froio (Sciences Po, CEE); Prof. Pedro Ramaciotti Morales (CNRS, Institute for Complex Systems)

Exploring the #NordStream Discourse on Twitter

Together with Luis Denart this work explores the Twitter discussion around the explosion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in 2022 in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Using social network analysis and large language models we find clearly identifiable communities showing different discourses and narratives concerning the event. The project was produced for a CSS class taught by Prof. Jean-Philippe Cointet, Prof. Marton Karsai, and Armin Pournaki.

Humans, Threat, or Management?

Framing Immigration in the Media during the 2022 Italian Election

Research paper produced for the class "From the Margins to the Mainstream – Far-Right Politics in Europe and Beyond" by prof. Caterina Froio. In it, I mapped the media discussion on immigration in Italy during the 2022 election using web crawling methods and social network analysis, and qualitatively analyse the frames used by different communities to talk about immigration.

Evaluating Fox News' impact on US senators' political communication

Together with Christoph Mautner Markhof, this project investigated the influence of Fox News on the Twitter communication of US senators using sentiment analysis.