arXiv subjects

Ulrich Matter

Publications and source records attributed to Ulrich Matter.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Who Owns the Online Media?

Ownership matters for the media's watchdog role. We map the ownership networks behind thousands of online news outlets in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The networks reveal who is ultimately responsible for the news: for over half of the outlets, a single entity. The rest sit behind multi-layered structures, making responsibility hard to trace. Market concentration, measured comparably across countries, is largely low to moderate. Looking at content, we find that co-owned outlets report more similarly, even within fixed outlet pairs, as ownership changes -- not least in the U.S., where reader demand is often thought dominant.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2022

Personalization of Web Search During the 2020 US Elections

Search engines play a central role in routing political information to citizens. The algorithmic personalization of search results by large search engines like Google implies that different users may be offered systematically different information. However, measuring the causal effect of user characteristics and behavior on search results in a politically relevant context is challenging. We set up a population of 150 synthetic internet users ("bots") who are randomly located across 25 US cities and are active for several months during the 2020 US Elections and their aftermath. These users differ in their browsing preferences and political ideology, and they build up realistic browsing and search histories. We run daily experiments in which all users enter the same election-related queries. Search results to these queries differ substantially across users. Google prioritizes previously visited websites and local news sites. Yet, it does not generally prioritize websites featuring the user's ideology.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2016

Revealing the Anatomy of Vote Trading

Cooperation in the form of vote trading, also known as logrolling, is central for law-making processes, shaping the development of democratic societies. Empirical evidence of logrolling is scarce and limited to highly specific situations because existing methods are not easily applicable to broader contexts. We have developed a general and scalable methodology for revealing a network of vote traders, allowing us to measure logrolling on a large scale. Analysis on more than 9 million votes spanning 40 years in the U.S. Congress reveals a higher logrolling prevalence in the Senate and an overall decreasing trend over recent congresses, coincidental with high levels of political polarization. Our method is applicable in multiple contexts, shedding light on many aspects of logrolling and opening new doors in the study of hidden cooperation.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2016

RWebData: A High-Level Interface to the Programmable Web

The rise of the programmable web offers new opportunities for the empirically driven social sciences. The access, compilation and preparation of data from the programmable web for statistical analysis can, however, involve substantial up-front costs for the practical researcher. The R-package RWebData provides a high-level framework that allows data to be easily collected from the programmable web in a format that can directly be used for statistical analysis in R (R Core Team 2013) without bothering about the data's initial format and nesting structure. It was developed specifically for users who have no experience with web technologies and merely use R as a statistical software. The core idea and methodological contribution of the package are the disentangling of parsing web data and mapping them with a generic algorithm (independent of the initial data structure) to a flat table-like representation. This paper provides an overview of the high-level functions for R-users, explains the basic architecture of the package, and illustrates the implemented data mapping algorithm.

stat.CO↗