Introduction to Political Communication Research

Students are introduced to Political Communication research by replicating in class a selection of recent papers. The substantive contribution of the proposed papers is reviewed in the light of exercises on the replication data, such as replicating the key findings, including extensions and additional robustness tests. In the first part of the seminar, students are offered an introduction to the R programming language and a refresher of regression analysis (linear regression, generalized linear model, multilevel/hierarchical data). One selected paper deals with the experimental design. In the final part, the seminar moves to familiarizing the students with Quantitative Text Analysis: students learn (by doing) how to scrape and analyze political text from various online sources (online newspapers, web pages, social media).