Jan Zilinsky
Postdoctoral Fellow
TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology
Research Associate
Center for Social Media and Politics (NYU)
Does technology disrupt democratic politics or does it merely render intolerance, inequalities and government incompetence visible?
I am a computational social scientist and I study the effects of technology on politics and society.
Photo: Last day of teaching a seminar on behavioral economics and political campaigns
Contact: jan.zilinsky@tum.de
Research
I develop methods and instruments for measuring what I consider to be important aspects of contemporary politics: economic populism, grievances, anti-tech sentiment, ideological arguments, and conspiracy theorizing. My work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Nature Communications, Political Analysis, Political Behavior, Political Communication, and other peer-reviewed journals.
Technology & Politics
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Content moderation and online safety
Platforms balance their wishes to respect users' free speech sensibilities with protecting people from online abuse. How can they deal with "lawful but awful" content, given that toxicity is often in the eye of the beholder? We measure preferences for content moderation and discuss how governance of platforms can be improved. -
Attitudes about AI
Which citizens are deeply skeptical of modern technology, and what are the downstream consequences of anti-tech attitudes? Thomas Zeitzoff and I are currently working on these questions. -
Digital media
My research has dealt with issues including foreign influence operations targeting US elections, the supply of political messages by celebrities, the filter bubble hypothesis, and toxicity of political Facebook ads. My latest paper analyzes the prevalence of beliefs in disinformation about the war in Ukraine in 19 countries.
Public opinion and political behavior: Are (especially young) citizens disillusioned with democracy? What are economic identities? What is the relative importance of identities, policy issues, and partisanship when people vote? Do heavy users of social media believe more conspiracy theories?
Methods: To what extent is economic sentiment influenced by motivated reasoning? With James Bisbee, we identified several considerations for measuring the component of (subjective) economic evaluations which is driven by objective economic conditions.
Papers
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Justifying an Invasion: Where and Why is Disinformation Successful? (first author with many co-authors) 2024. Political Communication. Open access
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Toxic Speech and Limited Demand for Content Moderation on Social Media. With Franziska Pradel, Spyros Kosmidis and Yannis Theocharis. 2024. American Political Science Review. Open access.
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Donate to help us fight back: Political fundraising and toxic rhetoric online. With Silvia Kim and Brian Brew. 2024. Party Politics.
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Summary: If political ads are making you angry — that’s because they were meant to.
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Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories and Online News Consumption during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. With Soyeon Jin. Franziska Pradel, and Yannis Theocharis. 2024. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media (open-access). Main figures.
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Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior. 2023. With Gregory Eady, Tom Paskhalis, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler and Joshua A. Tucker. Nature Communications. Published paper (open-access). Short summary. Coverage: Washington Post, Slow Boring, Nieman Journalism Lab, The Hill TV, Wall Street Journal, The Intercept, Tech Policy Press podcast, Columbia Journalism Review, Other
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Geographic Boundaries and Local Economic Conditions Matter for Views of the Economy. 2023. Political Analysis. With James Bisbee. Paper | Code and data
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Division Does Not Imply Predictability: Demographics Continue to Reveal Little About Voting and Partisanship. 2022. Political Behavior. With Seo-young Silvia Kim. Published paper (open-access) | Pre-print | Code on Github | MPSA Slides | Podcast
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Don’t Republicans Tweet Too? Using Twitter to Assess the Consequences of Political Endorsements by Celebrities. Perspectives on Politics, 2020. With Vaccari, C., Nagler, J. & Tucker, J. A. PDF | Monkey Cage summary
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Democratic deconsolidation revisited: Young Europeans are not dissatisfied with democracy.Research & Politics, 2019. PDF (open-access)
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How Many People Live in Political Bubbles on Social Media? Evidence from Linked Survey and Twitter Data. Sage Open, 2019. With Gregory Eady, Jonathan Nagler, Andrew Guess, and Joshua Tucker. PDF (open-access) | Summaries: Pacific Standard, Main chart
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The Happiness Gap in Eastern Europe. Journal of Comparative Economics, 2016. With Simeon Djankov and Elena Nikolova. PDF | Summary: Financial Times blog | Ungated SSRN & OSF pre-prints
Teaching
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Telling stories with R and Data Visualization
(Winter 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2024)-
Code and course materials: https://zilinskyjan.github.io/DataViz/
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Politics of Conspiracy Theories
(Every semester in academic years 2021-22, 2022-23 & 2023-24)
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Campaigns, Elections, and Social Media (Winter 2022, Spring 2023)
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Collecting Digital Trace Data
(Summer Institute in Computational Social Science)
Background
I was born in Czechoslovakia in the mid-1980s: the surveillance state was weakening, but travel restrictions in the one-party dictatorship were still in place. People needed an exit visa when they wished to leave the country, and they had to promise to return (because you were naturally an enemy or a saboteur if you were "not happy" in the communist paradise). By 1989 the defunct ideology, which was partly imposed but also partly home-grown, was finally discredited. The Velvet Divorce followed four years later, so the country listed on my birth certificate no longer exists. For me, witnessing Slovakia’s necessary transformation — but also the fragility of democracy and economic reforms in the face of bad ideas — was an experience more formative than the formal education I would receive. It’s because of those experiences that I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in a post-communist society. But the flip side of the timing of the fall of the Iron Curtain, which was lucky for me, is that my older family members were less fortunate. When my grandfather renounced his Communist Party membership in the 1960s (the occupying Soviet Army had just killed his sister), my mother was nearly barred from studying at a university. So, I come from a line of people who had to look over their shoulders and lower their voices whenever politics came up. Your friends could be regime informants, you never really knew for sure. (I like the story of how Stasi agents tried to recruit and corrupt the young Angela Merkel. She had a clever response for the officers: she insisted she was unable to keep secrets; see p. 29 in Kati Morton’s The Chancellor.) Crossing borders Without telling anyone at home, I applied to study at a bilingual French lycée as a teenager, spent a few years there and then — with the soft power of anglophone countries clearly working on me — applied to British and American universities. I moved to Harvard, where I watched Bush fumble his response to the global financial crisis and continued to be fascinated by how much economic outcomes depend on politics. A few days after graduating, Daron Acemoglu, David Laibson, and John List hired me as a research assistant. While waiting for my visa, I hung my hat at a central bank. Then a real stroke of good fortune found me when I was hired by the think-tank which you may know as the birthplace of the Washington Consensus. (But did you know it also published Dani Rodrik’s thoughtful pushback, Has Globalization Gone Too Far?) I found D.C. to be a place where introverts get a shot, learned from people who truly cared about policy, but then one fabulist had hacked the information ecosystem to gain unlimited free media and insulted his way to the White House. I bought some storage space to store my things in Washington, and went to NYU to try to do some systematic research about how digital technology affects the way politics gets done. With the help of advisers and colleagues, I wrote papers about echo chambers, Russian trolls, and other topics, received a PhD, and moved to post-Merkel Germany to work at the Technical University of Munich. Despite countless problems with the existing information environment, I have to reject nihilism. (Eastern Europe did survive four decades of nasty propaganda, remember?) I just don’t believe we now live in a post-truth era. Humans have the intellectual software to handle the digital age, and I hope that my forthcoming work will show you that there is a better way to think about the problems of contemporary politics.
Selected (non-peer-reviewed) articles
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The Political Logic of Republicans Standing with Trump against the Squad (Washington Post, Monkey Cage analysis)
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Is the FBI Impartial? Over Half of Republicans Say ‘No.’ Allegations of Political Biases in Law Enforcement Can Hurt Democracy. With Jonathan Ladd, Sean Kates, and Joshua Tucker. (Washington Post - TMC).
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Affective polarization and belief in voter fraud. (Washington Post - TMC, published shortly after the 1/6 riots.) Supplementary analysis
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Trump supporters who think he didn’t keep his promises are more likely to vote for Joe Biden in 2020. (Washington Post - Monkey Cage)
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Trying to understand how Jeff Flake is leaning? Ideological estimation with Twitter data.
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A methodological supplement explaining the method.
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Raising Lower-Level Wages: When and Why It Makes Economic Sense (an article with Justin Wolfers)
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Local Content Requirements: Backdoor Protectionism Spreading Under the Radar. With Cathleen Cimino-Isaacs. PIIE.
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Fiscal tightening and economic growth. With Paolo Mauro. PIIE Policy Brief.
Recent talks
Miami, Zurich, Florence, Abu Dhabi & Munich