Viktoria Spaiser

University of Leeds · School of Politics and International Studies

In 2015, the UN adopted a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to eradicate poverty, establish socioeconomic inclusion and protect the environment. Critical voices such as the International Council for Science, however, have expressed concerns about the potential incompatibility of the SDGs, specifically the incompatibility of socio-econ...

Mobilizing broad support for climate action is paramount for solving the climate crisis. Research suggests that people can be persuaded to support climate action when presented with certain moral arguments, but which moral arguments are most convincing across the population? With this pilot study, we aim to understand which types of moral arguments...

In recent years research on positive social tipping dynamics in response to the climate crisis has produced invaluable insights. In contrast, relatively little attention has been given to the potentially negative social dynamics that might arise due to an increasingly destabilised Earth system, and how they might in turn reinforce social destabilis...

In recent years, research on normatively positive social tipping dynamics in response to the climate crisis has produced invaluable insights. In contrast, relatively little attention has been given to the potentially negative social tipping processes that might unfold due to an increasingly destabilized Earth system and to how they might in turn re...

It is often argued that political will is needed to make progress on responding to the climate crisis. Political will needs a narrative though, substantiating why political intervention is needed. This paper examines the dynamics of key competing climate policy narratives in the political sphere – normative, i.e. morally underpinned pro-climate act...

A first horizon scan on tipping points in global catastrophic risks.

Youth Climate Activists are an important norm entrepreneur as humanity is increasingly awakening to the realities of accelerating climate change. They push for seeing climate change not merely through cost-benefit analysis frames but through frames of multiple climate justices and our responsibility to protect the most vulnerable, including our own...

Meeting the Paris Agreement will require unprecedented social change that goes hand in hand with technological and economic innovations. Research suggests that normative change, the change in what is perceived as normal or morally acceptable, can drive wider large-scale social change, i.e., change in legislation, policy, and behaviour. Normative ch...

There is increasing evidence that climate change and the threat it poses may increase authoritariantendencies within populations, contributing to increasing polarization and blocked climate change action.However, the mechanisms for these effects are still underexplored. In this study, we conduct a surveyexperiment (N=570) to better understand the c...

Digital data and methods are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Almost all aspects of people's lives are now digitized: population registers are digital; health records are digital, criminal records are digital, employment and education registers are digital, all our interactions with authorities (whether on a local, regional or national level) are...

Meeting the UN Paris Agreement will require unprecedented social change that goes hand in hand with technological and economic innovations. Research suggests that normative change, the change in what is perceived as morally acceptable, can drive wider large-scale social change, i.e., change in legislation, policy and behaviour. In this paper we exp...

Various economic and social characteristics have been used to explain individual vote choice in the 2016 British EU Referendum. Recently, researchers have considered the role various psychological orientations have played in this vote choice. Here, we are interested in two in particular: right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orient...

In the original online version of the chapter 5 was previously published non-open access. It was changed to open access retrospectively under a CC BY 4.0 license and, the presentation of Table 3 was different to that of Tables 2 and 4. This has been corrected. In addition, Tables 5 - 8 have been moved from the main text to Appendix B, at the reques...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media, MISDOOM 2021, held in September 2021. The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 9 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. The papers focus on health mis...

Recent work by Dunn et al. (2017) proposes an integration of two normally disparate fields of research: political culture and individual-level authoritarianism. This proposal notes a remarkable similarly between Welzel’s (2013) concept of emancipative values and the values-oriented conceptualization of authoritarianism proposed by Feldman and Stenn...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second Multidisciplinary International Symposium, MISDOOM 2020, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in October 2020.* The 18 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 23 submissions. The papers deal with the interdisciplinary field of computational social science, and in particular with...

In 2017 the paper “The Sustainable Development Oxymoron: Quantifying and Modelling the Incompatibility of Sustainable Development Goals" (Spaiser et al. 2017) was published, showing that there is a conflict between socio-economic development goals and ecological sustainability goals using cross-country time-series data. The authors looked at produc...

The UK Parliament introduced an e-petitions system in 2015 with the aim of significantly enhancing its relationship with the public. We explore whether this aim is being met through the analysis of Twitter data from conversations on e-petitions debated in Parliament. We use natural language processing, machine learning and social network analysis o...

We present a non-parametric extension of the conditional logit model, using Gaussian process priors. The conditional logit model is used in quantitative social science for inferring interaction effects between personal features and choice characteristics from observations of individual multinomial decisions, such as where to live, which car to buy...

Model comparison with and without distance to candidate neighbourhood. Marginal log-likelihoods (left panel) and BIC values (right panel) are shown for non-parametric models using different combinations of predictive features, including or excluding distance to the candidate neighbourhood as an additional feature. (EPS)

In 2017 the paper "The Sustainable Development Oxymoron: Quantifying and Modelling the Incompatibility of Sustainable Development Goals" (Spaiser et al. 2017) was published, showing that there is a conflict between socioeconomic development goals and ecological sustainability goals using crosscountry time-series data. The authors looked at producti...

Multiple countries have recently experienced extreme political polarization, which, in some cases, led to escalation of hate crime, violence and political instability. Besides the much discussed presidential elections in the USA and France, Britain's Brexit vote and Turkish constitutional referendum showed signs of extreme polarization. Among the c...

Contains 2822 Ukrainian sentiment dictionary words scored on the scale from -5 to 5.

Supplementary Material for: Polarized Ukraine 2014: Opinion and Territorial Split Demonstrated with the Bounded Confidence XY Model, Parameterized by Twitter Data

Ecological sustainability is the defining challenge of our time. Here we suggest a methodological approach that could help to investigate how environmental behavior (transport behavior, energy consumption, food consumption, goods consumption, wasting) dilemmas can be overcome on an individual level in real life by using smartphones to collect daily...

The most critical question for climate research is no longer about the problem, but about how to facilitate the transformative changes necessary to avoid catastrophic climate-induced change. Addressing this question, however, will require massive upscaling of research that can rapidly enhance learning about transformations. Ten essentials for guidi...

This paper is currently under review with Data Science.

In 2011-2012 Russia experienced a wave of mass protests surrounding the Duma and presidential elections. The protests, however, faded shortly after the second election. We study the Russian political discourse on Twitter during this period and the main actors involved: the pro-government camp, the opposition and the general public. We analyse aroun...

Agent-based models and computer simulations are promising tools for studying emergent macro-phenomena. We apply an agent-based approach in combination with data analysis to investigate the human development sequence (HDS) theory developed by Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel. Although the HDS theory is supported by correlational evidence, the s...

It is widely recognized that segregation processes are often the result of complex nonlinear dynamics. Empirical analyses of complex dynamics are however rare, because there is a lack of appropriate empirical modeling techniques that are capable of capturing complex patterns and nonlinearities. At the same time, we know that many social phenomena d...

This paper discusses the results of research on young immigrants' political participation on the Internet in Germany. The research focuses on young people from Turkish and East European backgrounds. The interrelation between offline political activities and online political participation is explained and the differences between the two groups are e...

Methods from machine learning and data science are becoming increasingly important in the social sciences, providing powerful new ways of identifying statistical relationships in large data sets. However, these relationships do not necessarily offer an understanding of the processes underlying the data. To address this problem, we have developed a...

The R package bdynsys for panel/longitudinal data combines methods to model changes in up to four indicators over times as a function of the indicators themselves and up to three predictors using ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with polynomial terms that allow to model complex and nonlinear effects. A Bayesian model selection approach is imp...

Over the past decades many countries have experienced rapid changes in their economies, their democratic institutions and the values of their citizens. Comprehensive data measuring these changes across very different countries has recently become openly available. Between country similarities suggest common underlying dynamics in how countries deve...

Data arising from social systems is often highly complex, involving non-linear relationships between the macro-level variables that characterize these systems. We present a method for analyzing this type of longitudinal or panel data using differential equations. We identify the best non-linear functions that capture interactions between variables,...

In this paper, young people's political participation on the Internet in Germany will be analyzed by statistical means and on the basis of survey data, comparing two groups: Germans the majority group and a minority group, consisting of young people from Turkey and various Arab countries, who share a religious affiliation. The young people from a T...

In this paper, young people's political participation on the Internet in Germany will be analyzed by statistical means and on the basis of survey data, comparing five groups: ethnic Germans (the majority group) and four different minority groups. Young people with Turkish or Arab background turned out to be particularly politically active online an...