The empiricist’s challenge: Asking meaningful questions in political science in the age of big data

Computational Social Science and the Study of Political Communication

“…• CSS research continues to remain weak in connecting its research designs and findings to established theories, concepts, mechanisms, and discussions in the social sciences (Jungherr & Theocharis, 2017); • While problems with data -especially when it comes to social media data -have been the subject of considerable debate in CSS (Japec et al, 2015;Sen et al, 2019;Stier et al, 2019), data generating processes and their effects on the composition, coverage, and interpretative meaning of signals in available datasets (Jungherr, 2019) are often treated as issues of -at best -secondary importance; • CSS as an interdisciplinary research field struggles with establishing practices that connect it more strongly within the established social sciences, develop standards of transparency in data collection, preparation, harmonization and analysis, and surface and problematize conflicts of interest between researchers, industry, and the media (Jungherr et al, 2020a). Steps that have been taken to address especially the last of those issues (King & Persily, 2019) have been met with skepticism (Bruns, 2019).…”

From Heroes to Traitors: Political Populism in the Catalan Independence Movement’s Use of Social Networking Sites

“…Theory will ultimately evolve towards a hybrid research logic combining the general framing of the traditional media and that created by social media users. This evolution will lead to the disappearance of a type of study and use of framing (Cacciatore, Scheufele, & Iyengar, 2016), as new academic uses linked to artificial intelligence or big data emerge (Jungherr & Theocharis, 2017). This paper is relevant to that theoretical development inasmuch as H1 and H2 cast light on a burning political issue.…”

Whither Now, Opinion Modelers?

“…Models may also prove to be valuable in the "measurement revolution" brought to social sciences by "big data" analyses [114]. ABMs may become the link between huge sets of digital traces we leave online and the theoretical concepts and debates in psychology and sociology.…”