ProDem researchers Matthias Hoffmann and Christina Neumayer have published a new article titled “Movement Parties’ Interactions on Social Media: Positioning and Trajectories in the Polity Arena” in the Journal of Information, Technology & Politics. In it, they report a longitudinal analysis (2010–2021) based on data from eighteen parties’ official social media accounts in six European countries. As the authors explain, “conceptually bridging cycles of contention, social movement lifecycles, and party lifespans, this research identifies regularities in referencing patterns between traditional party families; and by adding a temporal layer, outlines three trajectories of movement parties in the polity arena. The results contribute to conceptualizing movement parties as hybrid organizations and suggest a common logic of movement in positioning in the polity arena as drivers of party-to-party interactions moderated by country-specific contextual factors”.

The article can be accessed here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19331681.2023.2239817.

‘Democracy’ is often researched in political science as a particular form of political organization. But the word itself has become more of a ‘floating signifier’, with the ability to conjure a certain social imaginary. This imaginary relies however more on visual than textual narratives. My paper analyzes the visual discourse emerging during the 2017 anti-corruption protests in Romania, the largest since the country’s transition to democracy in 1989. The slogans and visual artifacts the protesters used are primary data for a paper asking how hegemonic reconfigurations of meaning blend with a new visual discursive reconstruction of the ‘people’.

Visionlinguistics: Panoramas of Languaging and visuality, DN29 DiscourseNet & The Open University, 13-15 September 2023

ProDem researchers Matthias Hoffmann, Felipe G. Santos, Christina Neumayer, and Dan Mercea have published the article “Lifting the Veil on the Use of Big Data News Repositories: A Documentation and Critical Discussion of A Protest Event Analysis” in Communication Methods and Measures. In it, they engage with big data repositories and critically discuss the usage of big data, its implications and invisibilities for social science research in general, and protest research in particular.

The article is published open access and can be viewed here: “https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19312458.2022.2128099

Postdoctoral Research Fellow Felipe G. Santos has recently published a paper titled ‘Populist strategy in the European parliament: How the anti-gender movement sabotaged deliberation about sexual health and reproductive rights’ in the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology. The paper is open access and you can read it through this link.

This week, our postdoctoral researcher Felipe G. Santos spoke to two Spanish media outlets about the conservative civil society and political party networks that are gathering in Budapest at the Summit of the Political Network for Values, as well as Hungary’s leadership in these circles. Click on the links for the Google translated versions of the articles: ElDiario & InfoLibre.

Dana S. Trif, Felipe Gonzales Santos and Dan Mercea were interviewed by Romanian newspaper “Adevărul” on the results of the Hungarian elections.

Cum l-a „ajutat” războiul din Ucraina pe Viktor Orban să câştige alegerile: „«Pacea» cu Rusia lui Putin, preferată de maghiari”

https://adevarul.ro/locale/cluj-napoca/cum-l-a-ajutat-razboiul-ucraina-viktor-orban-castige-alegerile-pacea-rusia-putin-preferata-maghiari-1_6280f9c95163ec42716e4415/index.html