A core part of my research focuses on party competition and political communication. Specifically, I investigate how parties try to connect themselves with different social groups, how they use social group appeals as a distinct communication strategy and in combination with policy issues, and the importance of social groups and group appeals for political representation.
Working papers:
Dolinsky, A. O. & Huber, L. M.: ‘Group Appeals as Representative Claims: A New Perspective on Parties’ Efforts to Connect with Voters.’ Pre-print
Huber, L. M. & Dolinsky, A. O.: ‘How parties shape their relationship with social groups: A roadmap to the study of group-based appeals.’ Pre-print
Huber, L. M. & Haselmayer, M.: ‘Strategic Alienation: The Dynamics of Group Appeals in Negative Campaigning.’ Work in progress.
Another part of my research focuses on political behavior and public opinion formation. Here I investigate voters’ responses to group appeals and how group sympathy and perceptions of group representation influence party choice.
Working papers:
Stubager, R., Dausgaard, C. H., Huber, L. M. & Lewis-Beck, M. S.: ‘Group sympathy and party choice: A longitudinal and comparative analysis of reference group theory.’ Under Review.
Dolinsky, A. O., Huber, L. M. & Van der Velden, M.: ‘Representation of Social Groups and Voters’ Reactions: A Survey Experiment.’ Work in Progress.
An additional strand of my research focuses on manual and automated text analysis for the study of social group appeals, issue emphasis, policy positions, and inter-party communication. For example, in a current project together with Alona O. Dolinsky and Will Horne, we develop a new supervised machine learning classifier for the extraction of social groups mentions and appeals from election manifestos.
Working papers:
Adendorf, A., Bahnsen, O., Gschwend, T., Huber, L. M., Paolo Ponzetto, S., Rehbein, I., Stoetzer, L. F.: ‘Measuring Inter-party Communication: A transfer learning approach.’ Revise and resubmit. Pre-print
Dolinsky, A. O., Huber, L. M. & Horne, W.: ‘Group Appeals in Historical Perspective—Comparing 50 Years of Parties’ Election Campaign Communication with Social Groups.’ Work in Progress.
Horne, W., Dolinsky, A. O. & Huber, L. M.: ‘Using LLMs to Detect Group Appeals in Parties’ Election Manifestos.’ Pre-print
Scharrer, M., Huber, L. M. & Müller, W. C.: ‘Tracing Alleged Problems of CMP Data.’ Work in Progress.