About Us Alejandro Ecker

Research in Progress

• Intra-party politics in multiparty governments (2019 – 2022): This research project exploits social network sites – most importantly Twitter – to construct a large-scale comparative data set on intra-party heterogeneity in parliamentary and presidential systems. Based on these unique data, it explores three sets of interrelated research questions. First, the project provides a cross-national comparative perspective on the effect of intra-party heterogeneity on government formation, portfolio allocation, and government termination. Second, the data likewise allow for investigating potential institutional and structural determinants of intra-party heterogeneity in democratic systems. Finally, the project contributes to research on the validity of measures based on social network sites by cross-validating the obtained measures of intra-party heterogeneity with alternative estimates retrieved from various other sources including parliamentary speeches, roll call votes, and survey data (among party elites and their rank and file). The project is funded by the 

  German Research Foundation

  .

• Identifying and classifying racist hate speech on social media (2020 – 2022): This collaborative research project with Marvin Brinkmann and Hartmut Wessler from the University of Mannheim analyses racist hate speech on social media. Racist comments, both by political elites and directed toward them, often attract media attention, but it is challenging to assess how widespread the phenomenon is and in which contexts it occurs. This project aims to develop a machine learning model to identify and classify racist hate speech in political contexts on social media to enhance our understanding of i) where racist language occurs, ii) whether it is influenced by users’ geographical context, and iii) how politicians and regular users interact in relation to racist language. It is funded by the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth as part of the DeZIM research network.

• The Consequences of bargaining deadlock: General elections are decisive moments in European democracies. However, a government mandate for a single political party is the exception rather than the rule and the composition of the future government is determined by post-election bargaining between political parties, an often strenuous and protracted process. This research project broadens our understanding of the consequences of bargaining deadlock by exploring three sets of interrelated research questions. First, it investigates how bargaining deadlock affects citizen support for the political system and to what extent fast and smooth coalition talks provoke different reactions with regard to populist attitudes and individual party preferences than strenuous and protracted ones. Second, the project investigates how the media report on bargaining deadlock during government formation. Finally, the project contributes to experimental research on media effects by employing survey experiments to explore how media reports about post-election bargaining directly affect citizen attitudes and behavior. Seed funding for this project is provided by the 

  MZES

  .

• The Public Negotiation of Justice in Transitions to Sustainability (JuTSy): The project is particularly interested in the public negotiation of justice in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), a region affected by climate change and pursuing decarbonization policies. The project builds on an interdisciplinary analytical framework, that combines knowledge from human geography, communication science, and political science to further our understanding of how societies negotiate just transitions and how politics both controls and responds to this public negotiation. While a geographical perspective pays attention to how perspectives on justice might differ according to spatial scales, communication research offers insight to understand how transition processes are communicated and framed. Political Science, in turn, helps us to understand what citizens perceive as just and what tenets (procedural, distributive, justice as recognition) are given priority to.