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Center for Information Networks and Democracy

Research

Center for Information Networks and Democracy
Research

2024. “Quantifying gender disparities and bias online", Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 29(1). [article]
2023. “The puzzle of misinformation: Exposure to unreliable content in the United States is higher among the better informed”, New Media & Society. [article]
2023. “Asymmetric Ideological Segregation in Exposure to Political News on Facebook”, Science, 381(6656): 392-398. [article]
2023. “Like-Minded Sources on Facebook are Prevalent but not Polarizing”, Nature, 620: 137–144. [article]
2023. “Reshares on Social Media Amplify Political News but Do Not Detectably Affect Beliefs or Opinions”, Science, 381(6656): 404-408. [article]
2023. “How Do Social Media Feed Algorithms Affect Attitudes and Behavior in an Election Campaign?”, Science, 381(6656): 398-404. [article]
2023. “Ancestral Kinship and the Origins of Ideology”, British Journal of Political Science. [article]
2023. “Commentary on Frontiers: Spilling the Beans on Political Consumerism: Do Social Media Boycotts and Buycotts Translate to Real Sales Impact?”, Marketing Science. [article]
2023” “Silenced on social media: The gatekeeping functions of shadowbans in the American Twitterverse”, Journal of Communication. [article]
2023. "Do Social Media undermine Social Cohesion? A Critical Review", Social Issues and Policy Review. [article]
2022. “Who is open to authoritarian governance within western democracies?”, Perspectives on Politics. [article]
2022. “Measuring dynamic media bias”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [article]
2022. “Reply to: Local news in Google News”, Nature Human Behaviour, 6(8), 1045-1047. [article]
2022. "The Advantage of the Right in Social Media News Sharing", PNAS Nexus, 1(3). [pre-print] [article]
2022. “Negative partisanship is not more prevalent than positive partisanship”, Nature Human Behaviour. [article]
2022. "The Blind Spots of Measuring Online News Exposure: A Comparison of Self-Reported and Observational Data in Nine Countries", Information, Communication & Society, forthcoming. [pre-print] [article]
2022. "The Gender Divide in Wikipedia: Quantifying and Assessing the Impact of Two Feminist Interventions", Journal of Communication. [pre-print] [article]
2022. “The Political Landscape of the US Twitterverse”, Political Communication. [article]
2022. “Beyond anonymity: Network affordances, under deindividuation, improve social media discussion quality”, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. [article]
2022. “The nature of affective polarization: Disentangling policy disagreement from partisan identity”, American Journal of Political Science. [article]
2021. "What Counts as a Weak Tie? A Comparison of Filtering Techniques to Analyze Co-Exposure Networks", Social Networks. [pre-print] [article]
2021. “Link recommendation algorithms and dynamics of polarization in online social networks”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [article]
2021. “Interindividual cooperation mediated by partisanship complicates Madisons cure for “mischiefs of faction”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [article]
2021. “The nonlinear feedback dynamics of asymmetric political polarization”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [article]
2021. “What Do We Mean by Negative Partisanship?” The Forum. [article]
2021. “Questionable and open research practices: attitudes and perceptions among quantitative communication researchers”, Journal of Communication. [article]
2021. "Worlds of Agents: Five Benefits of Agent-Based Modeling for Communication Research", Communication Methods and Measures, [article].
2021. “Policing the Digital Divide: Institutional Gate-keeping & Criminalizing Digital Inclusion”, Journal of Communication. [article]
2021. “Reconsidering the link between self-reported personality traits and political preferences”, American Political Science Review. [article]
2021 "Meaningful measures of human society in the twenty-first century", Nature [article]
2021 "The Internet and Public Policy: Future Directions", Policy & Internet. [article]
2021 "Bots are Less Central than Verified Accounts during Contentious Political Events", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [article]
2021. “Can I Stick to My Guns? Motivated Reasoning and Biased Processing of Balanced Political Information”, Communication Society.
2021. “Policy over party: comparing the effects of candidate ideology and party on affective polarization”, Political Science Research and Methods. [article]
2020 "Exposure to News Grows less Fragmented with an Increase in Mobile Access”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [article]
2020 "Computational social science: Obstacles and opportunities", Science 369(6507): 1060-1062. [article]
2020. “Neural polarization and routes to depolarization”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [article]
2020. “Auditing local news presence on Google News”, Nature Human Behaviour. [article]
2020. “A bigger pie: The effects of high-speed Internet on political behavior”, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. [article]
2020. “Projecting confidence: How the probabilistic horse race confuses and demobilizes the public”, The Journal of Politics. [article]
2020. “Understanding partisan cue receptivity: Tests of predictions from the bounded rationality and expressive utility perspectives”, The Journal of Politics. [article]
2019 "Computational Communication Science: A Methodological Catalyzer for a Maturing Discipline", International Journal of Communication, 13: 3912-34. [article]
2019. “Are there Still Limits on Partisan Prejudice?”, Public Opinion Quarterly. [article]
2019. “Brevity is the soul of Twitter: The constraint affordance and political discussion”, Journal of Communication. [article]
2019. “The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States”, Annual Review of Political Science. [article]
2019. “Race of Interviewer Effects in Telephone Surveys Preceding the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election”, International Journal of Public Opinion Research. [article]
2019. “Are Cultural and Economic Conservatism Positively Correlated? A Large-Scale Cross-National Test”, The British Journal of Political Science. [article]
2018 "The Backbone Structure of Audience Networks: a New Approach to Comparing Online News Consumption across Countries", Political Communication, 36(2): 227-240 [article] [pre-print]
2018 "Networks of Audience Overlap in the Consumption of Digital News", Journal of Communication, 68(1): 26-50 [pre-print] [article]
2018 "The Contagion Effects of Repeated Activation in Social Networks", Social Networks, 54, 326-335 [arXiv] | [article]
2018. “Selling Ourselves Short: The implications of brief personality measures for political psychology”, Journal of Politics. [article]
2018. “Affective Polarization and Ideological Sorting: A Reciprocal, albeit Weak, Relationship”, The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics. [article]
2017 "Digital News Consumption and Copyright Intervention: Evidence from Spain Before and After the 2015 ‘Link Tax’”, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication | [article]
2017. “The hostile audience: The effect of access to broadband internet on partisan affect”, American Journal of Political Science. [article]
2017. “Linking survey and media content data: Opportunities, considerations, and pitfalls”, Communication Methods and Measures. [article]
2017. “Selective exposure to balanced content and evidence type: The case of issue and non-issue publics about climate change and health care”, Journalism Mass Communication Quarterly. [article]
2017. “The Limits of Partisan Discrimination,” Journal of Politics. [article]
2017. “The Ideological Asymmetry of the American Party System”, British Journal of Political Science. [article]
2016 "The Dynamics of Information-Driven Coordination Phenomena: a Transfer Entropy Analysis", Science Advances, v. 2, n. 4 | [article]
2016 "Networked Discontent. The Anatomy of Protest Campaigns in Social Media", Social Networks, v. 44, pp. 95-104 | [article]
2016. “Democratic Like Us? Political Orientation and the Effect of Making Democracy Salient on Anti-Israel Attitudes”, Journal of Experimental Political Science. [article]
2016. “Binding moral foundations and the narrowing of ideological conflict to the traditional morality domain”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. [article]
2016. “Mass Polarization: Manifestations and Measurements”, Public Opinion Quarterly. [article]
2016. “Winners, Losers, and the Press: The Relationship Between Political Parallelism and the Legitimacy Gap”, Political Communication. [article]
2015 "The Critical Periphery in the Growth of Social Protests", PLoS ONE, 10(11): e0143611 | [article] | [Monkey Cage]
2015 "Network Effects in the Academic Market: Mechanisms for Hiring and Placing Ph.D.s in Communication (2007-2014)", Journal of Communication, v. 65, pp. 558–583 | [preprint] | [article]
2015 "Signals of Public Opinion in Online Communication: A Comparison of Methods and Data Sources", The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, v. 659, pp. 95-107 | [preprint] | [article]
2015. “Much ado about acquiescence: The relative validity and reliability of construct-specific and agree/disagree questions”, Research & Politics. [article]
2014 "The Emergence of Roles in Large-Scale Networks of Communication", EPJ Data Science, 3:32 [article]
2014 "Assessing the Bias in Samples of Large Online Networks", Social Networks, 38(1), 16-27 | [article]
2014. “Do Needs for Security and Certainty Predict Cultural and Economic Conservatism? A Cross-National Analysis”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. [article]
2013 "Big Data and the Fabric of Human Geography", Dialogues in Human Geography,3(3), 292-296 | [article]
2013 "Diffusion Dynamics with Changing Network Composition", Entropy (special issue Social Networks and Information Diffusion) | [article]
2013 "Social Science in the Era of Big Data", Policy & Internet, 5(2):147-160 | [pre-print] | [article]
2013 "Cascading Behaviour in Complex Socio-Technical Networks", Journal of Complex Networks | [pre-print] | [article]
2013 "Broadcasters and Hidden Influentials in Online Protest Diffusion", American Behavioral Scientist, 57(7):943-965 |[article] | [pre-print]
2012 "Emotions, Public Opinion and U.S. Presidential Approval Rates: A 5 Year Analysis of Online Political Discussions", Human Communication Research, 38(2): 121-143 | [article]
2012. “Affect, not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization”, Public Opinion Quarterly. [article]
2012. “Complete Anonymity Produces an Apparent Reduction in Social Desirability Response: Bias at the Expense of Accuracy”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. [article]
2012. “Projection as a Means of Dissonance Reduction: How Christians Reconcile their Personal Political Views and the Teachings of their Faith”, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [article]
2012. “Association of Religiosity and Political Conservatism: The Role of Engagement with Political Discourse”, Political Psychology. [article]
2011 "The Dynamics of Protest Recruitment through an Online Network", Scientific Reports | [article]
2010 "The Structure of Political Discussion Networks: A Model for the Analysis of Online Deliberation", Journal of Information Technology, 25 (2): 230-243 [article]
2010. “More than ideology: Conservative-liberal identity and receptivity to political cues”, Social Justice Research. [article]
2009 "Traps on the Web: the Impact of Economic Resources and Traditional News Media on Online Traffic Flow", Information, Communication and Society, 12 (8): 1140-1173 [article]
2009 "Opening the Black Box of Link Formation: Social Factors Underlying the Structure of the Web", Social Networks, 31(4): 271-280 [article]
2009. “Determinants of Turnout and Candidate Choice in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election: Illuminating the Impact of Racial Prejudice and Other Considerations”, Public Opinion Quarterly. [article]
2009. “Implicit and Explicit Prejudice in the 2008 American Presidential Election”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. [article]

2020, The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication, co-edited with Brooke Foucault-Welles, Oxford University Press | [OUP site]
2017, Decoding the Social World. Data Science and the Unintended Consequences of Communication, MIT Press | [MIT site] | [Video]

2023 (In Press) “The Internet and Affective Polarization” with Sean Fischer, in Our online emotional selves: The link between digital media and emotional experiences, edited by Robin L. Nabi and Jessica Gall Myric: Oxford University Press.
2022 "Semantic and Cultural Networks" with Sarah Sugars, in Handbook of Social Network Analysis, 2nd Edition, edited by John McLevey, Peter Carrington, and John Scott, London: Sage, forthcoming.
2022 “The structure, prevalence, and nature of mass belief systems” with Bert N. Bakker in Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology, edited by Danny Osborne and Chris G. Sibley: Cambridge University Press.
2022 "Polarización y Medios de Comunicación en España" with Silvia Majó-Vázquez, in Economic Policy: Policy Insight, Barcelona: Centro de Economía Política Esade .
2022. "Protest Networks, Mobilization, and Resilience" with Isabelle Langrock in Social Networks and Social Resilience, edited by Emmanuel Lazega, Tom Snijders, Rafael Wittek, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishers.
2021 "Información y Desinformación durante el Año de la Pandemia de la Covid-19 en España”, with Silvia Majó-Vázquez, in Informe sobre la Democracia en España, Madrid: Fundación Alternativas.
2020 "El Consumo de Noticias en Internet y en Redes Sociales en España”, with Silvia Majó-Vázquez, in Informe sobre la Democracia en España, Madrid: Fundación Alternativas.
2019 "Social Media Data: Quanitative Analysis", with Subhayan Mukerjee, in Atkinson, P. A. (ed) SAGE Research Methods Foundations, London: Sage.
2019 “National and Cross-National Perspectives on Political Media Bias” in Oxford Handbook of Electoral Persuasion, edited by E. Suhay, B. Grofman, and Trechsel: Oxford University Press.
2018 "Digital News and the Consumption of Political Information", with Silvia Majó-Vázquez, in Dutton, W.H. and Graham, M. (eds) Society and the Internet, 2^nd Edition. Oxford: OUP.
2018 “Expose Yourself: Discretionary Exposure to Political Information” with Gaurav Sood in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, edited by W. Thompson: Oxford University Press.
2017 "Scale, Time and Activity Patterns: Advanced Methods for the Analysis of Online Networks", with Javier Borge-Holthoefer, in Fielding, N., Lee, R., and Blank, G. (eds). Handbook of Online Research Methods, Thousand Oaks: Sage | [SageOnline] | [SSRN preprint]
2017 “Rethinking the Rigidity of the Right Model: Three Suboptimal Methodological Practices and Their Implications” with Ariel Malka and Nissan Holzer in Frontiers of Social Psychology: Politics of Social Psychology edited by J. T. Crawford and L. Jussim, New York: Psychology Press.
2016 "Semantic Networks and the Analysis of Public Opinion", with Sijia Yang, forthcoming in Victor, J.N., Lubell, M., and Montgomery, A.H. (eds). The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks, Oxford: Oxford University Press. | [Oxford Handbooks Online]
2015 "Social Protest and New Media", International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, London: Elsevier
2015 "Automated Content Analysis of Online Political Communication", with Ross Petchler, forthcoming in Coleman, S. and Freelon, D. (eds) Handbook of Digital Politics, London: Edward Elgar | [SSRN preprint]
2014 "Online Networks and Bottom Up Politics", in Dutton, W.H. and Graham, M. (eds) Society and the Internet: How Information and Social Networks are Changing our Lives, Oxford: Oxford University Press | [SSRN preprint]
2014 "Online Networks and the Diffusion of Protest", with Javier Borge-Holthoefer and Yamir Moreno, forthcoming in Manzo, G. (ed) Analytical Sociology: Norms, Actions, and Networks, London: Wiley
2014 "The Spanish 'Indignados' Movement: Time Dynamics, Geographical Distribution, and Recruitment Mechanisms", with Javier Borge-Holthoefer, Alejandro Rivero and Yamir Moreno, forthcoming in Agarwal, N., Lim, M., and Wigand, R. (eds) Online Collective Action: Dynamics of the Crowd in Social Media, NY: Springer
2010 “Priming” in International Encyclopedia of Political Science edited by George T. Kurian, CQ Press.

2022 “We study political polarization. The midterm election results make us hopeful.” The Hill, with Sean Westwood, Nov. 19.
2022 “Liz Cheney is extremely conservative. That won’t win over Conservatives.” The Washington Post, with Eric Groendyk, Erik Kimbrough, and Mark Pickup, August 2.
2020 “How Google is hurting local news” The Washington Post, with Sean Fischer and Kokil Jaidka, December 22.
2020 “Election forecasts helped elect Trump in 2016. It could happen again.” USA Today, with Solomon Messing and Sean Westwood, October 1.
2020 “Will the COVID-19 pandemic shake up conservatives views on government spending and involvement in the economy? Maybe.” The Washington Post, with Christopher Federico, Christopher D. Johnston, Howard Lavine, Ariel Malka, and Christopher J. Soto, April 15.
2019 “Twitter got somewhat more civil when tweets doubled in length. Here’s how we know.” The Washington Post, with Kokil Jaidka and Alvin Zhou, September 17.
2018 "Want to Change Facebook? Don’t Delete your Account—Use it for Good", Quartz, with Ashley Gorham, April 4.
2017 “In a new poll, half of Republicans say they would support postponing the 2020 election if Trump proposed it.” The Washington Post, with Ariel Malka, August 10.
2017 "Even Imperfect Algorithms Can Improve the Criminal Justice System. A Way to Combat the Capricious and Biased Nature of Human Decisions", The New York Times, with Sam Corbett-Davies and Sharad Goel, December 20.
2016 "Could online ‘slacktivists’ actually help Making a Murderer’s Steven Avery?", The Conversation, January 11.
2016 “Democrats policies are more popular. But Republicans are more ideologically unified.” The Washington Post, with Paul M. Snyderman, December 16.
2015 "Why everyone in a network is important for movements – even the Slacktivists!", The Washington Post, Monkey Cage, November 30.
2013 "The Dynamics of Information Diffusion in the Turkish Protests", The Washington Post, with Pablo Parberá, June 9.
2013 "15M, ¿nos vemos en las redes?", Piedras de Papel, eldiario.es, May 14
2013 "From Chiapas to Tahrir: Networks and the Diffusion of Protest", World Politics Review, April 16.
2012 "Where did the Revolution Go?", Al Jazeera English, April 6.

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Sandra González-Bailón Yphtach Lelkes