SODAS Data Discussion I (Fall 2026)
SODAS Data Discussion with Arianna Pera and Anton Mynster Kronberg.
Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science (SODAS) aspirers to be a resource for all students and researchers at the Faculty of Social Sciences. We therefore invite researchers across the faculty to present ongoing research projects, project applications or just a loose idea that relates to the subject of social data science.
Two researchers will present their work. The rules are simple: Short research presentations of ten minutes are followed by twenty minutes of debate. No papers will be circulated beforehand, and the presentations cannot be longer than five slides.
Discussion 1
Presenter: Arianna Pera
Title: Media Representations of Climate Advocates: Measuring Bias in News
Abstract:
Why do so many people express concern about climate change, yet relatively few see it as a top societal priority or engage in collective action? This project explores one possible reason: the people we see speaking about climate change may not feel very much like “people like us.”
We investigate who speaks in the media in favor of climate action, and how this compares with people advocating around other major social issues. Are climate advocates more likely to be scientists, NGO representatives, or professionals? Are ordinary citizens and activists who appear in the news less representative of the wider population—for example, because they are disproportionately young and urban? And does the way climate advocates speak make them seem more distant from ordinary audiences? In particular, we examine whether their language is more complex than that used by advocates of other issues.
To investigate these questions, we analyze news coverage from three countries over a five-year period, using large-scale computational methods and LLMs to identify and characterize climate advocates and their speech. The project is work in progress, and the talk will introduce our theoretical argument, research design, and preliminary results. We will also use the opportunity to get feedback on several aspects of the project.
Discussion 2
Presenter: Anton Mynster Kronborg
Title: Pork, Please: When do Legislators Pay for Local Goods
Abstract:
Pork-barrel politics are ubiquitous, and scholars have described the electoral incentives for that urge politicians to deliver targeted goods in great detail. Yet, legislators regularly “pass on pork'' in systems otherwise characterized by clientelism. Why is that and what are those legislators doing instead? I address the questions with novel data on Constituency Development Fund (CDF) spending and parliamentary questions from Zambia, bridging the literature on how politicians allocate public resources and studies of legislative behavior. The findings reveal that support for the locally dominant party is associated with more spending, irrespective of the support for the local Member of Parliament (MP). More spending is neither connected to parliamentary questions overall, nor questions on behalf of the constituency as a whole. However, more spending comes with fewer questions representing the interests of specific constituents within the area. Firstly, the results emphasize the importance of political parties for local spending, even in a context where parties emerge and erode at every other election. Secondly, spending outcomes at the local level does not predict if legislators represent their constituencies but predicts how they do it. This suggests that legislators do not maximize targeted pork, but that such efforts are at a stable equilibrium. Combined, the findings have implications for the understanding of politicians' incentives and for the potential of a funding scheme targeting the world's poorest.
