Ralph Schroeder’s research while affiliated with University of Oxford and other places

This paper draws on Collins’s conflict theory to understand the contemporary surge of populism. It puts forward an account centred on citizenship rights and the state, and on ‘my nation first’ politics in four countries: the US, Sweden, India and China. Collins has identified a capitalist crisis, the dynamics of geopolitical legitimacy, and state-penetrating bureaucracy as three central processes in modern societies. Especially the last of these focuses attention on the conflict between cosmopolitan elites and ‘the people’, construed in exclusionary terms, which is on the rise in all of the four cases discussed here. The paper analyses the similarities and differences between them, and sketches the prospects for populist politics.

There has been a recent surge of political actors and groups challenging the legitimacy of established political institutions and mass media. We argue that this wave is no accident; rather, it is driven by digital media. Digital media allow outside challengers to route around social institutions that structure political discourse, such as parties and legacy media, which have previously held a monopoly on political coordination and information distribution. Digital media have weakened the power of these institutions, allowing outsiders to maintain extreme positions that formerly would have been filtered out or suppressed by institutions structuring political discourse. In this article, we explicate mechanisms linking digital media to the rise of outsiders by discussing the successes of a diverse set of challengers fighting for attention and representation in the different political contexts of the United States, Germany, and China. We thus provide a novel explanation that systematically accounts for the political consequences of digital media.

Research using big data has become popular in the social sciences, raising many new questions. This essay focuses on the question of cumulation, and why the kind of cumulation that is characteristic of social data science is more akin to cumulation in the natural sciences. The reasons for this include how research teams are organized and how they compete to exploit certain data sets to improve upon the work of other teams. There are other factors, however, that mitigate against cumulation, including the lack of access to certain datasets and a lack of building on existing findings in the social sciences. Some of these factors pertain to fundamental philosophical issues in social science, including new ideas about the workings of causal explanation. Others relate to the collaboration or absence of collaboration between different disciplines and to the difference between more applied and more academic research. The essay reviews these factors and develops an account of cumulation anchored in a realist philosophy of science and in the practices and tasks of social science research. It concludes with a call for big data research to be more integrated with already ongoing cumulative findings in the social sciences while recognizing that there are several obstacles to such an integration.

Este artigo discute a novidade do big data, argumentando que ela pode ser definida em relação ao tipo de conhecimento que é criado. Destaca a importância do big data na pesquisa em ciências sociais e, especialmente, na pesquisa em comunicação, apesar de essa investigação ser em parte limitada pelas fontes (comerciais, muitas vezes) de dados. Outro impedimento é que essa pesquisa está avançando em muitas direções, mas sem integrar o conhecimento descoberto em relatos gerais do papel da mídia na mudança social. E a maior parte desse conhecimento não está sendo produzido nas ciências sociais, mas sim no setor privado e em contextos políticos. O big data recoloca também, em novas perspectivas, certas questões como a da privacidade e a da vigilância social.

While talk of "Big Data" is now prevalent in many sectors, there are still relatively few examples of Big Data being used to shape public policy. This article reports an international study of Big Data for policy initiatives to understand the role played by data-driven approaches in the policy process. Drawing on evidence (including policy analysis and interviews with stakeholders) from 58 initiatives, we find that some policy areas, notably efforts to improve government transparency, are far more represented than others, such as use of social media data for policy evaluation. We also find Big Data used more often in the policy cycle for foresight and agenda setting, or interim evaluation and monitoring, rather than for policy implementation and ex post evaluation. Many different types of data are used in the policy process, with traditional sources such as government statistics still favored over new and emerging sources. We find that use of Big Data for public policy is therefore at an early stage, with expectations far outstripping the current reality.

The election of Donald Trump and the great disruption in the news and social media. Donald Trump's election as the 45th President of the United States came as something of a surprise—to many analysts, journalists, and voters. The New York Times's The Upshot gave Hillary Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning the White House even as the returns began to come in. What happened? And what role did the news and social media play in the election? In Trump and the Media, journalism and technology experts grapple with these questions in a series of short, thought-provoking essays. Considering the disruption of the media landscape, the disconnect between many voters and the established news outlets, the emergence of fake news and “alternative facts,” and Trump's own use of social media, these essays provide a window onto broader transformations in the relationship between information and politics in the twenty-first century. The contributors find historical roots to current events in Cold War notions of "us" versus "them," trace the genealogy of the assault on facts, and chart the collapse of traditional news gatekeepers. They consider such topics as Trump's tweets (diagnosed by one writer as “Twitterosis”) and the constant media exposure given to Trump during the campaign. They propose photojournalists as visual fact checkers (“lessons of the paparazzi”) and debate whether Trump's administration is authoritarian or just authoritarian-like. Finally, they consider future strategies for the news and social media to improve the quality of democratic life. Contributors Mike Ananny, Chris W. Anderson, Rodney Benson, Pablo J. Boczkowski, danah boyd, Robyn Caplan, Michael X. Delli Carpini, Josh Cowls, Susan J. Douglas, Keith N. Hampton, Dave Karpf, Daniel Kreiss, Seth C. Lewis, Zoey Lichtenheld, Andrew L. Mendelson, Gina Neff, Zizi Papacharissi, Katy E. Pearce, Victor Pickard, Sue Robinson, Adrienne Russell, Ralph Schroeder, Michael Schudson, Julia Sonnevend, Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, Tina Tucker, Fred Turner, Nikki Usher, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Silvio Waisbord, Barbie Zelizer