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SE Political Communication and Electoral Analysis - Enhanced Level

Students acquire the ability to list different approaches to electoral analysis and party research as well as political communication and media research. Moreover, they know how to analyse the influence of public opinion to politics.

This course will introduce students to empirical analysis of political communication in both domestic and international contexts using quantitative text analysis, which is becoming increasingly popular among political scientists as one of the computational methods. Quantitative text analysis involves computer programming, but this course does not require prior experience.

Through this course, students will be able to answer political scientific questions by acquiring the skills to (1) write simple programming code in R and (2) perform statistical analysis of textual data, and the knowledge of (3) various applications of quantitative text analysis techniques in political communication research.

Among several types of communication media, we focus to the “elite media” (i.e. TV broadcast and newspapers) as the traditional channels of political communication, which remain important today but require set of techniques to analyse. The instructor will explain the techniques from the very basic linking political communication and linguistics theories with computer algorithms.

Students will work on their own research projects in the seminars to write a final essay using the techniques that will be covered in this course. Students must bring their laptop computers to the classroom to use R Studio and R packages in programming and data analysis.

Quantitive text analysis (programming and statistical analysis) 

Final essay (70%) and class presentations (30%) 

McNair, B. (2011). An Introduction to Political Communication (5 edition). London ; New York: Routledge.

Iyengar, S., & Kinder, D. R. (2010). News That Matters: Television and American Opinion, Updated Edition. University of Chicago Press.

Entman, R. M. (2004). Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy. University of Chicago Press.

Krippendorff, K. (2004). Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. Sage.   

successful completion of compulsory modules 1, 2, 3 and 9