arXiv subjects

Antti Gronow

Publications and source records attributed to Antti Gronow.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Audience capture, selective exposure, affective assimilation or ideological sorting? Polarisation of climate politics under low media-party parallelism

Studies often attribute the polarisation of climate politics in majoritarian democracies to differing treatment of climate change by conservative and liberal media. How then does such polarisation occur in a system, where mainstream media do not systematically align with party positions? Focusing on how users in different ideological blocs posted and commented on news articles on Finnish Twitter between 2015 and 2023, we address four mechanisms: audience capture, where outlets adapt to increasingly differentiated audiences, reinforcing their divergence through feedback between audience engagement and editorial incentives; selective exposure, where users post ideologically congruent articles from the same outlets; affective assimilation, where users communicate identical content with ideology-consistent valence; and ideological sorting, where identity-driven alignment structures news-posting behaviour across multiple issues. Bayesian regression models indicate increasing divergence in outlet choice, with conservative-leaning users posting more tabloid content, in line with audience capture, and partial support for selective exposure, as within-outlet article posting becomes increasingly differentiated. Valence divergence increases only slightly over time, providing moderate support for affective assimilation, while issue-specific communities show weak alignment with blocs despite convergence over time. Our work refines theories of media effects beyond majoritarian democracies and contributes to understanding the current impasse in climate politics.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2026

Climate Policy Elites' Twitter Interactions across Nine Countries

Social media is an important space for interactions between climate policy actors, with a burgeoning literature recognizing them as critical platforms of political contestation. We identified Twitter accounts associated with 904 climate change policy actors across nine countries, and collected their activities from 2017--2022, totalling 40 million activities from 16,086 accounts at different organizational levels. We studied these actors and their interactions as a polycentric governance system, emphasizing how boundary blurring between the public and private on social media platforms uniquely shapes the online policy process. Initial results show there is considerable temporal and cross-national variation in how prominent climate-related activities were, but all national policy systems generally responded to climate-related events, such as climate protests, in a similar manner. Examining patterns of interaction within and across countries, we find that these national policy systems rarely directly interact with one another, but are connected through consistently engaging with the same content produced by accounts of international organizations, climate activists, and researchers.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

Political polarisation in turbulent times: Tracking polarisation trends and partisan news link sharing on Finnish Twitter, 2015-2023

The study analyses polarisation on Finnish social media with data from the platform X, which was known as Twitter during the time of data collection (during the Sipilä and Marin governments, 2015-2023). The users were clustered into three different ideological groups - the Conservative Right, the Moderate Right, and the Liberal Left - based on their retweeting of tweets referring to the different political parties in Finland. Trends in polarisation of several topics encompassing the most recent political crises - immigration, climate change, COVID-19, and security policy - between these ideological groups is analysed using network methods. To what extent the polarisation of each topic aligns with the polarisation of the other topics is also studied. In addition, the sharing of news links is examined in relation to the ideological groups of the users as well as to the sentiment and the virality of the tweets in which news links are shared.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2023

Complex coalitions: political alliances across relational contexts

Coalitions are central to politics, including government formation, international relations, and public policy. Coalitions emerge when actors engage one another across multiple relational contexts, but existing literature often approaches coalitions in singular contexts. We introduce complex coalitions, a theoretical-methodological framework that emphasises the relevance of multiple contexts and cross-context dependencies in coalition politics. We also implement tools to statistically infer such coalition structures using multilayer networks. To demonstrate the usefulness of our approach, we compare coalitions among Finnish organisations engaging in climate politics across three con-texts: resource coordination, legacy media discourse, and social media communication. We show that considering coalitions as complex and accounting for cross-context dependencies improves the empirical validity of coalition studies. In our case study, the three contexts represent complementary, but not congruent, channels for enacting coalitions. In conclusion, we argue that the complex coalitions approach is useful for advancing understanding of coalitions in different political realms.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2023

The Russian invasion of Ukraine selectively depolarized the Finnish NATO discussion

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 dramatically reshaped the European security landscape. In Finland, public opinion on NATO had long been polarized along the left-right partisan axis, but the invasion led to a rapid convergence of the opinion toward joining NATO. We investigate whether and how this depolarization took place among polarized actors on Finnish Twitter. By analyzing retweeting patterns, we find three separated user groups before the invasion: a pro-NATO, a left-wing anti-NATO, and a conspiracy-charged anti-NATO group. After the invasion, the left-wing anti-NATO group members broke out of their retweeting bubble and connected with the pro-NATO group despite their difference in partisanship, while the conspiracy-charged anti-NATO group mostly remained a separate cluster. Our content analysis reveals that the left-wing anti-NATO group and the pro-NATO group were bridged by a shared condemnation of Russia's actions and shared democratic norms, while the other anti-NATO group, mainly built around conspiracy theories and disinformation, consistently demonstrated a clear anti-NATO attitude. We show that an external threat can bridge partisan divides in issues linked to the threat, but bubbles upheld by conspiracy theories and disinformation may persist even under dramatic external threats.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Polarization of Climate Politics Results from Partisan Sorting: Evidence from Finnish Twittersphere

Prior research shows that public opinion on climate politics sorts along partisan lines. However, they leave open the question of whether climate politics and other politically salient issues exhibit tendencies for issue alignment, which the political polarization literature identifies as among the most deleterious aspects of polarization. Using a network approach and social media data from the Twitter platform, we study polarization of public opinion toward climate politics and ten other politically salient topics during the 2019 Finnish elections as the emergence of opposing groups in a public forum. We find that while climate politics is not particularly polarized compared to the other topics, it is subject to partisan sorting and issue alignment within the universalist-communitarian dimension of European politics that arose following the growth of right-wing populism. Notably, climate politics is consistently aligned with the immigration issue, and temporal trends indicate that this phenomenon will likely persist.

physics.soc-ph↗