Anastasopoulos, Lefteris, et al. Working Paper. “
Photographic home styles in Congress: a computer vision approach”.
Publisher's VersionAbstractWhile members of Congress now routinely communicate with constituents using images on a variety of internet platforms, little is known about how images are used as a means of strategic political communication. This is due primarily to computational limitations which have prevented large-scale, systematic analyses of image features. New developments in computer vision, however, are bringing the systematic study of images within reach. Here, we develop a framework for understanding visual political communication by extending Fenno's analysis of home style (Fenno 1978) to images and introduce "photographic" home styles. Using approximately 192,000 photographs collected from MCs Facebook profiles, we build machine learning software with convolutional neural networks and conduct an image manipulation experiment to explore how the race of people that MCs pose with shape photographic home styles. We find evidence that electoral pressures shape photographic home styles and demonstrate that Democratic and Republican members of Congress use images in very different ways.
Anastasopoulos, Lefteris. Working Paper. “
A formal model of segregation and political polarization.”.
AbstractRacially segregated cities tend to be politically polarized cities, leading to inequalities in public goods provision, political and social isolation, concentrated poverty and the perpetuation of a sense of hopelessness among many living in America’s urban centers. While the links between racial segregation and political polarization are well established, it is less clear why, or through what mechanism, both arise simultaneously. In this article, we derive a formal model which we demonstrate can partially account for this puzzle. This model allows us to derive “ideological tipping points”: changes in neighborhood demographics at which all members of one or more groups along the ideological spectrum (liberal, conservative, moderate) relocate. We then validate the model and demonstrate that racial segregation and political polarization consistently emerge in equilibrium under a wide variety of conditions by simulating movement of individuals between Census tracts in the largest 10 cities in the United States.