* Graduate student coauthor, #Undergraduate student coauthor
Working papers
The Hidden Power of Trade: Trade Networks as Mediators for Regime Type on Human Rights Voting
Yehzee Ryoo*, Adeline Lo, Keith Levin. Working paper available upon request.
How and why do democracies vary in their support for human rights resolutions on the international stage? Although democracy is often seen as the primary determinant of foreign-policy decisions on normative issues like human rights protection, empirical evidence is mixed: autocratic states such as China often show greater support for human rights resolutions than the United States in the United Nations General Assembly. We investigate this puzzle by applying a network mediation model that conceptualizes trade networks as mediators explicitly, hypothesizing that complex trade interdependence between states channel the effect of regime type on human rights voting decisions. The model estimates each state’s latent position in the trade network using singular value decomposition and quantifies the indirect effect of regime type on voting behavior through economic ties. Our analysis reveals that the indirect impacts of regime type via trade interdependence is substantial and different from that of direct impacts. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions about normative alignment among democracies and highlight the constraining influence of trade networks on values-based foreign policy. Our work identifies previously neglected indirect effects of economic networks among states, strengthening the connection between theoretical expectations and empirical analysis through social network approaches.
How Increasing Refugee Visibility on TV News Causes Viewers to Support Refugees More, but Like Them Less
Adeline Lo and Oliver Lang*. Working paper available upon request.
As global refugee flows accelerate, so does local news coverage on the subject and the potential for major political consequences. In an analysis of all broadcasts of the most famous television news program in Germany 2013-2019, we first show observationally (through text and image analysis) that refugee coverage increases with immigration and is correlated in different ways with public opinion about refugees. Conditioning on these patterns, we then implement a nationally representative block randomized media experiment. We find that TV news coverage of refugees causes viewers to be more willing to donate money to pro-refugee organizations, but surprisingly to feel colder and more socially distant towards them. We discuss the far reaching consequences of this divergent pattern for the future of local politics in Germany and potentially around the world.
Refugees in the Headlines: Threat Narratives and Media Representation Across Three Decades
Koo “Jo” Kim* and Adeline Lo. Working paper available upon request.
We study 30 years of news from three legacy global newspapers to uncover core ways refugee stories are told in these stories using language associated with security and economic threats as well as humanitarian framing. To do this, we train and fine-tune embeddings specific to this corpus, incorporate transformers models to conduct detailed name entity recognition, and test how embeddings related to threats systematically occur across refugee articles using embedding regression approaches. We find evidence in support of threat differences in refugee stories, but surprisingly highlight further threat language usage when stories relate to the U.S. as receivers of refugee flows in particular. Despite this rise in threat framing, humanitarian language has remained relatively stable over the decades, often more prevalent in U.S. stories. We consider implications of refugee representations in media stories on polarizing attitudes towards refugees and beliefs about U.S. immigration.
Work in progress
Methods for Sequence Analysis
with Héctor Pifarré i Arolas & Keith Levin.
Co-Identity Peer Praise and Empathy
with Jonathan Renshon & Lotem Bassan-Nygate*.