Polarization in Public Opinion

The research aim of this project is to combine two state-of-the-art approaches in measuring opinion - survey research and data analytics of social media. Its focus lies on the topics of polarization of opinions on social exclusion, climate change, and COVID-19 to identify if and how polarization - a shift towards more extreme positions - occurs within those sources, if and how opinions and respondents differ between sources, and whether the opinions in the sources are aligned.

Project details

This project is part of the Route63 collaboration and funded by both Graz University of Technology and University of Graz.

Contacts

Subject Area	Computer Science	Sociology
University	Graz University of Technology	University of Graz
Institute	Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science	Institute of Sociology
Project Head	Assoc.Prof. Elisabeth Lex	Univ.-Prof. Markus Hadler
Email	elisabeth.lex(at)tugraz.at	markus.hadler(at)uni-graz.at
PhD Student	Markus Reiter-Haas	Beate Klösch
Email	reiter-haas(at)tugraz.at	beate.kloesch(at)uni-graz.at

Publications

Reiter-Haas, M., Klösch, B., Hadler, M., & Lex, E. (2024). Computational Narrative Framing: Towards Identifying Frames through Contrasting the Evolution of Narrations. Presented at the Text2Story’24 Workshop co-located with the ECIR’24. (to appear)
Hadler, M., Ertl, A., Klösch, B., Reiter-Haas, M., & Lex, E. (2024). The climate gluing protests: Analyzing their development and framing in media since 1986 using sentiment analyses and frame detection models. Accepted for presentation at 16th ESA Conference 2024: Tension, Trust and Transformation (pdf)
Wardana, R., Klösch, B., Reiter-Haas, M., & Penker, M. (2024) Media Representation of Environmental Movements: Unveiling Frames in news articles on the Last Generation in Austria. Accepted for presentation at 16th ESA Conference 2024: Tension, Trust and Transformation (pdf)
Reiter-Haas, M., & Lex, E. (2024). The Framing Loop: Do Users Repeatedly Read Similar Framed News Online? In Proceedings of the 7th HUMANIZE Workshop. (link)
Reiter-Haas, M., Klosch, B., Hadler, M., & Lex, E. (2024). FrameFinder: Explorative Multi-Perspective Framing Extraction from News Headlines. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (pp. 381-385). (link, preprint)
Reiter-Haas, M., Klösch, B., Hadler, M., & Lex, E. (2023). Semantic Graphs Reveal the Narrative Framing in News NetSci 2023. Presented at Vienna, Austria. (abstract)
Klösch, B., Hadler, M., Reiter-Haas, M., & Lex, E. (2023). Polarized opinions on Covid-19 and environmental policy measures. The role of social media use and personal concerns in German-speaking countries. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 1-24. (link)
Reiter-Haas, M., Ertl, A., Innerhofer, K., & Lex, E. (2023). mCPT at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Multilingual Label-Aware Contrastive Pre-Training of Transformers for Few-and Zero-shot Framing Detection. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.09901. (link)
Reiter-Haas, M. (2023). Exploration of Framing Biases in Polarized Online Content Consumption. Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023, 560–564. Presented at the Austin, TX, USA. (link)
Reiter-Haas, M., Klösch, B., Hadler, M., & Lex, E. (2022). Polarization of Opinions on COVID-19 Measures: Integrating Twitter and Survey Data. Social Science Computer Review, 41(5), 1811-1835. (link,pdf)
Hadler, M., Klösch, B., Reiter-Haas, M., & Lex, E. (2022). Combining Survey and Social Media Data: Respondents’ Opinions on COVID-19 Measures and Their Willingness to Provide Their Social Media Account Information. Frontiers in Sociology, 7. (link)
Klösch, B., Hadler, M., Reiter-Haas, M., & Lex, E. (2022). Social Desirability and the Willingness to Provide Social Media Accounts in Surveys. The Case of Environmental Attitudes. 4th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (link)
Hadler, M., Klösch, B., Reiter-Haas, M., & Lex, E. (2022). Respondents’ opinion on COVID-19 and their willingness to provide their social media info in a survey. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Los Angeles, August 2022.
Wardana, R., Klösch, B., & Hadler, M. (2022). Umwelt in der Krise. Einstellungen zu Klimawandel und Umweltbesorgnis sowie Bereitschaft zu umweltbewusstem Verhalten in Krisenzeiten. Aschauer, W., Glatz, C., Prandner, D. (eds) Die österreichische Gesellschaft während der Corona-Pandemie. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. (link)
Hadler, M., Klösch, B., Lex, E., & Reiter-Haas, M. (2021). Polarization in public opinion: Combining social surveys and big data analyses of Twitter (SUF Edition) AUSSDA, V1, UNF:6:jPjxWXqS6RVg4uYo3Zplcw== [fileUNF] (dataset)
Klösch B., Hadler M., Reiter-Haas M., & Lex E. (2021). Polarization of Opinions on Political Measures in German-Speaking Countries – A Comparison between the COVID19 Crisis and the Climate Crisis. 15th Conference of the European Sociological Association. (abstract)
Klösch B., Reiter-Haas M., Hadler M., & Lex E. (2021). Erkenntnisse und Herausforderungen in der Kombination von Umfrage- und Twitter-Daten: Eine Untersuchung der gesellschaftlichen Polarisierung in der COVID-19 Debatte im deutschsprachigen Raum. Gemeinsamer Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS) und der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Soziologie (ÖGS). (abstract)
Reiter-Haas, M., Klösch, B., Hadler, M., & Lex, E. (2021). Opinion Polarization on COVID-19 Measures: Integrating Surveys and Social Media Data. 7th International Conference on Computational Social Science. (link)
Reiter-Haas, M., Kopeinik, S., & Lex, E. (2021). Studying Moral-based Differences in the Framing of Political Tweets. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 15(1), 1085-1089. (link)
Reiter-Haas, M., Klösch, B., Hadler, M., & Lex, E. (2020). Bridging the Gap of Polarization in Public Opinion on Misinformed Topics. Challenging Misinformation: Exploring Limits and Approaches, workshop co-located with Social Informatics’20. (pdf)