1/ Happy to share our paper 'Still Instrumentally Inclusive' w/ @turnbulldugarte.com in @apsrjournal.bsky.social. Understanding homonationalism remains important. Recent events (Berlin) have shown how quickly LGBT+ rights can become instrumentalized in debates about immigration and Islam.
Cambridge University Press Political Science & IR@cambup-polsci.cambridge.org · last wk.#OpenAccess from @apsrjournal.bsky.social - Still Instrumentally Inclusive - https://cup.org/4bhrhsp "Do individuals in Western democracies shift their views on LGBT+ inclusion when exposed to opposition from Muslim out-groups?" - @turnbulldugarte.com & @bertous.bsky.social #FirstView
![2026-03-11 | Input talk | Andreas Küpfer (TU Darmstadt & University of Birmingham)
Politics in Action: Studying Multimodal Data from Local Meetings to National Parliaments
Hybrid event [A5, 6, Room A231 + Zoom]
März 11, 2026, 13:45-15:15
Abstract
The analysis of multimodal political communication enables political scientists to study how politicians and parties behave in previously untapped ways. While large volumes of audiovisual data are increasingly available, these data are typically unstructured and vary substantially in quality, requiring robust and carefully designed processing pipelines. This talk guides through the challenges and opportunities of analysing political video data across institutional contexts. Analysing videos from local political meetings, including US school boards and state supreme courts, allows the generation of features such as transcriptions, gendered speech shares, and agenda items. However, the often semi-professional production quality of such recordings limits the systematic use of visual information. By contrast, legislative debate recordings are typically standardised and post-edited, enabling the leverage of visual features such as eye contact seeking to study the emergence of dominant behaviour during parliamentary speech. Scaling multimodal processing and feature extraction workflows across heterogeneous institutional contexts is, therefore, crucial. It enables the systematic study of political communication across levels of government and over longer time periods.
Presenter
Andreas Küpfer is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the DFG-funded project "Analysing Legislative Politics with Aligned Text, Audio and Image Data" at the Institute for Political Science of the Technical University of Darmstadt, holding a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Mannheim. He works at the intersection of Data Science and Political Science. His research focuses on (multimodal) political communication, combining computational with tradi…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:oizrkjzyr6vekl76tjctghcl/bafkreiawvyqdytqoc4essm7llpzps33qsxpv6spg6i4fi5fk7qy33p63ye)
![2026-02-25 | Input talk | Klara Müller (University of Mannheim)
When Events Change Samples: Disentangling Causal Effects from Compositional Bias in Quasi-Experimental Designs
Hybrid event [A5, 6, Room A231 + Zoom]
Februar 25, 2026, 13:45-15:15
Abstract
From political psychology, we know that salient political events can shape political attitudes and behavior. In studying such event effects, quasi-experimental designs, such as the unexpected event during survey design (UESD), have become increasingly popular. To allow for causal identification, these designs rest on quite strict assumptions, one of which is the random assignment of respondents to the pre- and post-event sample and the comparability of these samples. From survey methodology, however, we also know that external events can affect who responds to surveys. If event-triggered shifts in survey participation and sample composition are related to outcome variables of interest, causal estimates of an event’s effect may be biased. This problem is particularly challenging when compositional shifts involve unobserved or even unobservable factors. In this talk, I provide intuition for how such compositional bias can threaten causal conclusions in quasi-experimental settings. I present a framework to disentangle an event’s “true” causal effect from compositional bias, with a particular focus on the UESD approach. The framework outlines practical strategies to adjust for observable imbalances and extends sensitivity analyses to assess how strong unobserved confounders would have to be to change or undermine substantive causal conclusions. I illustrate the approach using the rally-around-the-flag effect following the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks in France, as well as replications of published UESD studies on terrorist events and rally-style outcomes. By addressing both observable and unobservable sources of bias, this framework enhances causal inference and strengthens the credibility of public opinion research in d…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:oizrkjzyr6vekl76tjctghcl/bafkreic2cgit5plcrxatdivgtpsgu3lcasarcxqw33t5no6a7fzcp2smyi)
