Public Sphere Projects

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

Master Thesis - 2024
Full Manuscript

In my thesis I explore whether the arguments developed by Benkler, Farris, and Roberts in their 2018 book "Network Propaganda" apply in contexts outside of the US – i.e., in countries with different media and political systems. In dialogue with the literature in comparative media studies, political communication, and political science, I leverage 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

Master Paper - 2023
Full Paper
In this work, together with Luis Denart, we explored 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

Master Paper - 2023
Full paper
This was a 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

Master Paper - 2022
Project Summary
In this project, together with Christoph Mautner Markhof, we investigated the influence of Fox News on the Twitter communication of US senators using sentiment analysis.

Mapping the Connection between Celebrities and Politicians on Twitter

Bachelor's Paper - 2019
This is my first ever computational social science project, conducted under the supervision of prof. Chris Bail during a course at the Venice International Universtity. Together with the class we mapped the connections between US celebrities and politicians from the US house of representatives on Twitter using social network analysis. The results show little connection – in terms of retweets, citations, and likes – between the two classes (in the vizualization below, politicians are on the left and celebrities on the right).