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Michael Heseltine

@michaelheseltine.bsky.social
428 followers 270 following 50 posts

Post-Doc at University of Oxford. Congress, text-as-data, and political communications.

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Michael Heseltine @michaelheseltine.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Excited to share our new @apsrjournal.bsky.social paper! We introduce the Scaled & Classified Congressional Communication (SCCC) dataset: 7M+ congressional communications across X, Facebook, and email, classified by topic, tone, and a range of core strategic measures. doi.org/10.1017/S000...
doi.org
Measuring Partisanship and Representation in Online Congressional Communications | American Political Science Review | Cambridge Core
Measuring Partisanship and Representation in Online Congressional Communications
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American Political Science Review @apsrjournal.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
From our FirstView: Measuring Partisanship and Representation in Online Congressional Communications by Michael Kistner @mkistner.bsky.social, Michael Heseltine @michaelheseltine.bsky.social, Robert Alvarez, Maya Fitch, Lucas Lothamer, and Elizabeth Simas @bethsimas.bsky.social buff.ly/Wlnc5LY
doi.org
Measuring Partisanship and Representation in Online Congressional Communications | American Political Science Review | Cambridge Core
Measuring Partisanship and Representation in Online Congressional Communications
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Christopher Barrie @cbarrie.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
📄 New paper: people choose AI models partly on political grounds This is joint work with @pettertornberg.com @chrisbail.bsky.social @michelleschimmel.bsky.social and led by @michaelheseltine.bsky.social
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Jon Green @jongreen.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
now online! link.springer.com/article/10.1...
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Nate Persily @persily.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
The Draft Volume of the APSA AI Task Force, cochaired by Josh Tucker and me, is now available. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, POLITICS, AND POLITICAL SCIENCE will be published by Cambridge Press later this year, but the draft chapters are available today: apsanet.org/wp-content/u...
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Petter Törnberg @pettertornberg.com · 08/04/2026
Like Grok and Attie, more and more social media platforms now integrate AI directly in online conversations. But how do these AI bots actually impact political discourse? We ran a series of experiments to find out. (Spoiler: the news are not altogether great.) osf.io/preprints/so...
osf.io
OSF
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Michael Heseltine @michaelheseltine.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
Dream content for @reuning.bsky.social ...
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Michael Heseltine @michaelheseltine.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
🚨NEW PAPER Going Local? Localized Rhetoric in Congressional Communications Is congressional comms really nationalized? Analyzing 9M+ social media posts from Members of Congress, I show that local messaging is still common & strategic. New ML + domain sharing data www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
tandfonline.com
Going Local? Localized Rhetoric in Congressional Communications
In the face of the purported nationalization of political discourse in the United States, to what extent do congressional representatives still engage locally through their public communications? B...
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Michael Heseltine @michaelheseltine.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
🚨NEW PAPER Going Local? Localized Rhetoric in Congressional Communications Is congressional comms really nationalized? Analyzing 9M+ social media posts from Members of Congress, I show that local messaging is still common & strategic. New ML + domain sharing data www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
tandfonline.com
Going Local? Localized Rhetoric in Congressional Communications
In the face of the purported nationalization of political discourse in the United States, to what extent do congressional representatives still engage locally through their public communications? B...
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Reposted by Michael Heseltine
British Journal of Political Science @bjpols.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
#OpenAccess - Believing What Politicians Communicate: Ideological Presentation of Self and Voters’ Perceptions of Politician Ideology - cup.org/4gTSToM - @hjghassell.bsky.social, @michaelheseltine.bsky.social & @reuning.bsky.social ‬ #FirstView
BJPolS abstract which discusses the relationship between politicians' communication and voter perceptions through social media content analysis between 2012 and 2022.
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Michael Heseltine @michaelheseltine.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
🥳 Our new paper is out at the British Journal of Political Science. We find a strong link between the ideology of candidate messaging and the perceived ideology of these candidates among voters. Evidence that voters can differentiate between candidates and are attuned to what candidates say.
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Michael Heseltine @michaelheseltine.bsky.social · 12/08/2025
📜Preprint!📜 GPT5 replacing GPT4 effectively renders a whole range of existing GPT-reliant research unreproduceable. Open-source LLMs offer a science-friendly alternative, but which to use? I test 28 different LLMS in 7 languages so you can pick the best models for your task. osf.io/preprints/os...
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Kevin Reuning @reuning.bsky.social · 27/06/2025
I have a new paper forthcoming at BJPS with @hjghassell.bsky.social and @michaelheseltine.bsky.social looking at how social media messaging impacts perceptions of incumbent/candidate ideology. We find messaging ideology does relate to perceptions w/overtime changes Pre-print: osf.io/preprints/so...
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Research & Politics @respol.bsky.social · 11/01/2025
R&P editors' collection 2024 (2/4) @michaelheseltine.bsky.social & B. C. von Hohenberg find that GPT-4 coding of political text is highly accurate for shorter texts, but performance drops for longer ones, suggesting consideration should be given to task complexity when using LLM-assisted coding.
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Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
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Michael Heseltine @michaelheseltine.bsky.social · 07/01/2025
🚨New at AJPS to start off the year! Do partisans change their news consumption based on daily news sentiment about their team? Democrats read more news on bad days for Republicans and less on bad days for Dems. Republicans turn to more conservative news on bad days for Republicans.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
American Journal of Political Science | MPSA Journal | Wiley Online Library
We assess the phenomenon of partisan temporal selective avoidance, or individuals dynamically altering their news consumption when news is negative toward their in- and out-party. Using nine months o...
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Matt Grossmann @mattgrossmann.bsky.social · 07/01/2025
Democrats reduce news consumption when daily news sentiment is negative toward Democrats & increase it when it is negative toward Republicans. Republicans respond to negative Republican sentiment by increasing consumption at conservative news outlets. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
American Journal of Political Science | MPSA Journal | Wiley Online Library
We assess the phenomenon of partisan temporal selective avoidance, or individuals dynamically altering their news consumption when news is negative toward their in- and out-party. Using nine months o....
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Michael Heseltine @michaelheseltine.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
My article "Asymmetric Polarization in Online Media Engagement in the United States Congress" is published in the latest edition of IJPP. Republican media engagement and sharing on social media has increased in extremity over time, but not Democratic. Clear Trump effect. doi.org/10.1177/1940...
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Michael Heseltine @michaelheseltine.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
✏️New in Political Communication ✏️ w/ great coauthors. We examine perceived polarization in the US and Poland. Both exposure to partisan news and exposure to general coverage with polarization reporting frames increase perceived personal distance from other side. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
tandfonline.com
Effects of Over-Time Exposure to Partisan Media and Coverage of Polarization on Perceived Polarization
America is said to be more polarized than ever before, and extensive research examines the causes and effects of political polarization. A less studied but more pronounced trend is that citizens pe...
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Michael Heseltine @michaelheseltine.bsky.social · 01/03/2024
🚨New paper in R&P: Testing GPT-4 on a range of common political science coding tasks in 4 languages. We find generally strong results at a fraction of the time and cost. We also introduce an effective double-code and validate approach for LLM coding. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com
Large language models as a substitute for human experts in annotating political text - Michael Heseltine, Bernhard Clemm von Hohenberg, 2024
Large-scale text analysis has grown rapidly as a method in political science and beyond. To date, text-as-data methods rely on large volumes of human-annotated ...
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Michael Heseltine @michaelheseltine.bsky.social · 06/12/2023
🚨Was the COVID-19 pandemic a rhetorically unifying or divisive event for elites in the US? I test this at the federal, state, and local level. Initially COVID was a unifying event, but quickly became a divisive topic, especially for Congressional Republicans. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com
Polarizing Online Elite Rhetoric at the Federal, State, and Local Level During the COVID-19 Pandemic...
Times of national and international crisis are often unifying events which lower levels of division within the public and between political elites. Yet, COVID-1...
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Michael Heseltine @michaelheseltine.bsky.social · 27/11/2023
New paper in IJPP 🚨 How do Members of Congress engage with the media online? From news link sharing and media mentions from MoC over the last 10 years I find clear asymmetric polarization in news media engagement over time, driven by Republican Members... Polisky journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Your gateway to world-class journal research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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Michael Heseltine @michaelheseltine.bsky.social · 29/09/2023
👍 Across tasks and languages, we test the viablility of LLMs like GPT-4 to replace human coders for machine learning training data, with mostly strong results! Negligable downstream effects on trained transformer models. We also offer a suggested pipeline for researchers. Polisky osf.io/cx752
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Philip Bump @pbump.com · 06/09/2023
New analysis of Trump's endorsements from 2018 to 2022 shows that he gave Republicans a double-digit boost in primaries — and cost them vote margin in the general. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
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Michael Heseltine @michaelheseltine.bsky.social · 22/08/2023
New Publication 🚨 I examine Donald Trump's endorsements in congressional races while in and out of office (2018-2022). Endorsed candidates receive a small vote penalty overall. Trump backed more safe candidates and allies (election deniers) in 2022. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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