Alexandra Siegel

Who Claims Fraud? Correlates of State Legislators' Voter Fraud Claims

Avery Lord — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:31:35 +0000

Who Claims Fraud? Correlates of State Legislators' Voter Fraud Claims Avery Lord Thu, 06/18/2026 - 10:31

Who Claims Fraud? Correlates of State Legislators' Voter Fraud Claims

By: Samantha Register, Srinivas Parinandi, Alexandra A Siegel

Abstract:

State legislators play a key role in election administration, but have increasingly challenged the legitimacy of elections. Using a dataset of tweets from over 4200 state legislators, we examine the institutional, individual, and state-level factors associated with legislators' propensity to make electoral fraud claims from 2019 to 2022, a period characterized by heightened criticism of status quo electoral procedure. We find that Republican partisanship, state polarization, serving in a state with a higher nonwhite population, and belonging to the state's upper chamber are correlated with more frequent election fraud tweets. Meanwhile, legislative professionalism, committee leadership, unified government, and being a female legislator are associated with making fewer fraud claims. By shifting attention from Congress to state legislatures—institutions that directly oversee election rules and administration—we identify correlates of public contestation of electoral procedure among subnational elites.

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The politics of identity and sectarianism

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:57:08 +0000

The politics of identity and sectarianism Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 08:57

The politics of identity and sectarianism

By: Fanar Haddad, Lisel Hintz, Rima Majed, Toby Matthiesen, Bassel F Salloukh, Alexandra A Siegel

Abstract: The 2011 popular uprisings left an indelible mark on the politics of identity in the Middle East. Minority- based regimes, such as Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy and Syria’s Alawi- led republic, weaponized sectarian differences to crush democratic opposition against their rule. Regional powers like Saudi Arabia and Iran deployed sectarian discourse to mobilize same- sect proxies and intervene in the local politics of shattered states like Syria and Yemen. At this revolutionary juncture, it appeared that sectarian sentiments had come to dominate the regional public sphere, shaping how individuals and groups congregated for political purposes. Yet not a decade later, a far different image emerged. In 2019, Lebanese and Iraqis of varying identities mobilized in national protest against political systems organized around sectarian lines. They targeted institutionalized corruption, economic deprivation, and political venality— all of whichwere produced by confessional politics enshrined within exclusive power- sharing arrangements and neoliberal economic structures.1

These relatively recent moments follow a familiar pattern: political events in the Middle East are often tied to sectarian concerns that can appear baffling to researchers of comparative politics and international relations. It is high time that scholars tackle this issue in order to bridge the gap between regional knowledge and mainstream political science. Sectarianism here means the politicization of sectarian differences.2 This topic is integral within the MENA to understanding how social forces engage one another, how state authorities deal with demands from below, how capitalism operates in relation to identity politics, and how regional conflicts can take massive turns for the worse.

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Tracking Legislators’ Expressed Policy Agendas in Real Time

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:44:49 +0000

Tracking Legislators’ Expressed Policy Agendas in Real Time Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 08:44

Tracking Legislators’ Expressed Policy Agendas in Real Time

By: Alexandra Siegel, David Laitin, Duncan Lawrence, Jeremy Weinstein, Jens Hainmueller

Abstract:

We develop a real-time scalable method to analyze strategic communication by political actors on salient policy issues through their tweets. Using word embeddings and supervised machine learning models, we classify legislators’ tweets according to whether or not they reference policy issues as well as what positions they promote. This allows us to measure the microdynamics of elite communication with a high level of temporal granularity in a manner that is scalable across diverse issue areas and legislatures. As a proof of concept, here we use this method to track the multi-year evolution of positions that members of Congress express on immigration and climate change. Validation with issue-specific vote scores suggests that our method performs with a satisfactory level of accuracy and enables us to identify legislators whose online rhetoric differs substantively from their voting behavior. We also display the immigration analysis on an automatically updated publicly available interactive website, enabling researchers, journalists, and policy makers alike to explore legislators’ shifting rhetoric on immigration in real-time.
∗ We thank Justin Grimmer and members of the Immigration Policy Lab for helpful comments and suggestions; New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics for hosting our realtime data collection; and Steve Eglash for facilitating our access to Twitter’s Historical PowerTrack API. We recognize funding from NEO Philanthropy/Four Freedoms Fund. Funders had no role in the data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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In-house vs. outsourced trolls: How digital mercenaries shape state influence strategies

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:35:36 +0000

In-house vs. outsourced trolls: How digital mercenaries shape state influence strategies Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 08:35

In-house vs. outsourced trolls: How digital mercenaries shape state influence strategies

By: Renée DiResta, Shelby Grossman, Alexandra Siegel

Abstract:

When governments run influence operations they may leverage in-house capabilities, outsource to digital mercenaries, or use a combination of these strategies. We theorize that governments outsource because it provides plausible deniability if the operation is uncovered, and offers access to cutting-edge influence tactics beyond those common to established government institutions. Using data from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, we test implications of this theory via two covert online influence campaign case studies, each focused on Syria, executed by Russia’s military intelligence agency (colloquially known as the GRU), and by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a privately owned company. We find that the GRU focused on the creation of front media properties that produced longform journalistic content, an established tactic more amenable to reaching general audiences. By contrast, the IRA exploited the architecture of social media platforms to target specific audiences with memes and customized messages that were more narrowly tailored than those spread by the GRU. We also find that the tailored content produced by the IRA received higher engagement than GRU longform articles when posted to the same platforms, even if we include cascades of interactions from re-posts of GRU-authored articles that spread beyond their own Facebook page. Our findings highlight the importance of disaggregating information operations by actor type and across platforms to better understand their tactics and impact.

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Measuring Media Freedom

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:34:11 +0000

Measuring Media Freedom Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 08:34

Measuring Media Freedom

By: Christopher Barrie, Neil Ketchley, Alexandra Siegel, Mosaab Bagdouri

Abstract:

The ability of news media to criticize government is a core pillar of media freedom and is often taken as evidence of meaningful democratization. Existing indices typically use scoring criteria or expert surveys to develop over-time measures of media freedom. In this article, we use the largest existing dataset of Arabic-language news to evaluate how political reporting about the government changes over the course of successful and failed democratic transitions in Egypt and Tunisia. Using entirely unsupervised ALC wordembedding techniques, we demonstrate how to generate temporally granular measurements of media criticism that closely correlate with measurements derived from expert surveys for both countries. Crucially, the technique we propose is computationally inexpensive, opensource, and cost-free—making it eminently scalable. Our work therefore points to new possibilities in the monitoring and measurement of media capture within authoritarian and transitional settings.

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Opinion manipulation on Farsi twitter

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:32:41 +0000

Opinion manipulation on Farsi twitter Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 08:32

Opinion manipulation on Farsi twitter

By: Amirhossein Farzam, Parham Moradi, Saeedeh Mohammadi, Zahra Padar, Alexandra A Siegel

Abstract:

For Iranians and the Iranian diaspora, the Farsi Twittersphere provides an important alternative to state media and an outlet for political discourse. But this understudied online space has become an opinion manipulation battleground, with diverse actors using inauthentic accounts to advance their goals and shape online narratives. Examining trending discussions crossing social cleavages in Iran, we explore how the dynamics of opinion manipulation differ across diverse issue areas. Our analysis suggests that opinion manipulation by inauthentic accounts is more prevalent in divisive political discussions than non-divisive or apolitical discussions. We show how Twitter’s network structures help to reinforce the content propagated by clusters of inauthentic accounts in divisive political discussions. Analyzing both the content and structure of online discussions in the Iranian Twittersphere, this work contributes to a growing body of literature exploring the dynamics of online opinion manipulation, while improving our understanding of how information is controlled in the digital age.

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How threats of exclusion mobilize palestinian political participation

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:30:25 +0000

How threats of exclusion mobilize palestinian political participation Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 08:30

How threats of exclusion mobilize Palestinian political participation

By: Chagai M Weiss, Alexandra A. Siegel, David Romney

Abstract:

Do exclusionary policies mobilize minority political participation? We theorize that the threat of exclusionary policies creates and resurfaces grievances that facilitate mobilization. To test our theory, we leverage Donald Trump's announcement of a peace plan for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which posed a threat to the citizenship status of Palestinian citizens of Israel residing in the Triangle area adjacent to the West Bank. First, using more than 170,000 posts from public Facebook groups and pages, we show that Trump's announcement was indeed a more salient political event for Triangle residents. Then, employing locality-level election data as well as records detailing the origin of citizens’ joining a Jewish-Arab social movement, we use a difference-in-difference design to demonstrate that the threat to citizenship imposed by Trump's plan increased mobilization in the Triangle area. Our evidence from three distinct data sources suggests that threats of exclusion can mobilize minority political behavior.

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Modeling and generation of realistic network activity

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:29:19 +0000

Modeling and generation of realistic network activity Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 08:29

Modeling and generation of realistic network activity

By: Stefan Tschimben, Isabella Bates, James H Curry, Keith D Gremban, Alexandra Siegel

Abstract:

The growing quantity of wireless network activity generated every second of every day creates challenges for network operators, such as detecting anomalies and providing sufficient capacity. This same network activity also creates opportunities for Smart and Connected Systems (SCSs) to adapt to changing population dynamics, detect and proactively adapt to unexpected events such as public safety threats, traffic jams, or adverse weather events, for example. The GHOST project is researching the challenges of modeling, analyzing, and generating patterns of network activity. The GHOST project has demonstrated that Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) provides a robust mechanism for modeling network activity patterns that can be used to generate realistic network activity. The GHOST team has further demonstrated the capability for injecting programmed activity patterns into a live, functioning wireless network.

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Asylum: How Syrian Refugees Engage with Online Information

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:07:46 +0000

Asylum: How Syrian Refugees Engage with Online Information Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 08:07

Asylum: How Syrian Refugees Engage with Online Information

By: Alexandra Siegel, Jessica Wolff, Jeremy Weinstein

Abstract:

Despite an emergent body of literature examining refugees' use of online tools to access information, little is known about what types of information refugees encounter or engage with. Analyzing 143,201 posts and 802,173 comments on public Arabic-language Facebook pages targeting Syrian refugees from 2013 to 2018, we systematically describe one of Syrian refugees' most popular online information ecosystems. Additionally, we use engagement and comment data to develop organic measures of refugees' interactions with different information sources. We find that posts linking to official sources of information garnered more engagement than those containing unofficial information or news media content, regardless of the topic or tone of the message. Disaggregating our data over time reveals that official sources did not receive higher levels of engagement until early 2016, when new official sources created by governments and NGOs became active online and began to more consistently provide information about salient topics from asylum to sea travel. These new official sources also produced more encouraging messages relative to older official sources, perhaps heightening their appeal. By analyzing the online prevalence, content, and popularity of diverse information sources, this work contributes to our understanding of how vulnerable populations access information in the digital age, while offering policy insights to governments and NGOs seeking to disseminate information to refugees

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Are Minorities Punished More Harshly for Underperformance? Evidence from Premier League Soccer

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:06:19 +0000

Are Minorities Punished More Harshly for Underperformance? Evidence from Premier League Soccer Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 08:06

Are Minorities Punished More Harshly for Underperformance? Evidence from Premier League Soccer

By: Ala Alrababah, William Marble, Salma Mousa, Alexandra Siegel

Abstract:

Positive intergroup contact has been shown to improve attitudes toward stigmatized minorities. A concern with the contact paradigm is that it may place unreasonable demands on minorities to be high-performers. Are minorities judged more harshly for under-achieving relative to the majority group? Conversely, are minorities more readily rewarded for their success? We use evidence from English top-tier soccer to answer these questions. We measure how journalists and fans react to players’ performances, using objective measures of performance. We find little evidence of discrimination based on nationality and ethnicity. These results are consistent across three diverse datasets consisting of millions of social media posts, hundreds of thousands of newspaper articles, and tens of thousands of Fantasy Premier League transfers. The discrimination we do uncover—when players perform extremely poorly—is small in magnitude, and often runs counter to the expected direction. Journalists and fans punish poor performances, but not differentially so based on player identity. The results suggest that minorities need not uphold ‘model minority’myths in order to be accepted.

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