Publications & Working Papers
The Disrupting Effect of Focusing Events on Immigration Discourse in the UK: an Automated Discourse Network Analysis (Working Paper) In this paper we explore and apply a new automated approach to discourse network analysis, which combines topic modeling and network analysis in order to identify changes in political discourse over time. Using UK Parliament speeches between 1979 and 2020, we measure the effect of focusing events on migration discourse among policymakers in Parliament. The original corpus includes more than two million speeches; we exclude those speeches that did not include information about the speaker, that were procedural in nature, and that focus on policy topics unrelated to migration. Substantively relevant speeches are determined using an original dictionary of migration-specific words; speeches are excluded if the content did not meet a manually-validated threshold of migration-specific words. Next, we identify concepts within each speech using latent dirichlet allocation; the resulting concepts then form the basis for the network analysis. Last, we measure monthly and yearly change in the discourse and coalition networks. We find that focusing events lead to substantial disruption in extant discursive communities in one of two ways: discursive communities either become more cohesive or more polarized depending on the type of focusing event.
Who Cares? Measuring US Public Attitudes Towards Companies’ Social and Environmental Activism (Working Paper/Dissertation Chapter) How and where should companies focus their corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities? Does supporting certain causes increase consumer support and loyality more than others? Through a survey experiment conducted with a representative sample of the US population, this paper sets out to answer these questions. I compare US conumser attitudes towards CSR activities around climate change, the BLM movement, and refugee protection and find that there are indeed differences in preferences. The study confirms that companies' engagement in some causes can positively influence consumer trust, loyality, and purchasing intentions. It further illuminates what type of activites and support (donations, material support, education/hiring, etc) consumers expect from companies.
