Join our leading social scientists as they consider cutting-edge quantitative and qualitative methodologies, analyse the logic underpinning an array of approaches to empirical enquiry, and discuss the practicalities of carrying out research in a variety of different contexts
Authoritarian Communication at Scale: What Text-as-Data Reveals about Russia
Non-free regimes restrict public access to credible micro-data and can distort self-reported information. As a result, research inference often relies on signals embedded in text. News transcripts, official statements, and social-media posts become sources where narrative choices and language provide observable proxies for otherwise hidden processes. Recent reviews of research on Russia emphasise the limits of survey-based evidence in repressive settings and call for broader methodological toolkits beyond self-reports. In this presentation, I show how text-as-data methods can meet that need by analysing state television news transcripts alongside Twitter/X posts to study, respectively, the supply of mass-media communication and #NoWar activism in present-day Russia.
In the first part of the presentation, drawing on my PhD dissertation, I present results from an analysis of a large corpus of news from Russian state-controlled television to quantify tone and agenda over time. Using NLP for sentiment and a semi-supervised approach to country/topic labelling, validated against human labelling, I show that Vladimir Putin is presented disproportionately in positive coverage, that his visibility varies between domestic and foreign news, and that the salience and framing of Ukraine evolve alongside editorial changes. The focus is on scalable, transparent pipelines, including pre-processing, model selection, validation, and robustness, which make mass-media manipulations measurable at scale.
I then turn to Twitter/X to study digital activism around #нетвойне (#NoWar). Using a corpus of over 100,000 tweets from the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 through the end of 2024, I trace when anti-war expression intensifies, how frames and emotions circulate across communities, and what distinguishes durable mobilisation from transient bursts.
Taken together, this presentation offers a template for text-as-data research in authoritarian settings. It combines validated measurement with design-based checks to show what the regime seeks to place on the public agenda and, drawing on social-media analysis, provides a case study of how publics mobilise around anti-war expression.
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Our seminars take place in person during Autumn and Winter term and are free and open to all, LSE students and staffs and external participants. Light refreshements provided.
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Events archive
Autumn Term
Quantifying the effect of research policies governing scientific editors. Fengyuan 'Michael' Liu,Global PhD Fellow, Data Science and AI Lab, New York University, Abu Dhabi
The limits of explainability for reducing algorithmic discrimination. Dr Kate Vredenburgh, Assistant Professor, Department of Philsophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics
The Tools of Racial Disenfranchisement: Lessons from 135,457 Individual Voter Records. Dr Daniel de Kadt - Assistant Professor, Department of Methodology, London School of Economics
Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right: Evidence from England's National Health Service. Dr Zachary Dickson - LSE Fellow, Department of Methodology, London School of Economics
Winter Term
Causal Representation Learning with Generative Artificial Intelligence: Application to Texts as Treatments. Professor Kosuke Imai - Professor of Government and of Statistics, Harvard University.
Security from Below: A Hermeneutic-Contextualist Methodology for Studying Marginalised Security Actors. Dr Bohdana Kurylo, LSE Fellow.
Mediating Transnational Mining Disputes in Liberal Democracies. The Ghanaian Case. Dr Isaac Haruna Ziaba, LSE Fellow.
Comparing the Performance of Machine Learning Ensembles for Multilevel Regression and Poststratification Models.Dr Lucas Leemann- Associate Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Zurich.
Just a Number?: Age Misstatement and the Old-Age Pension in Colonial Ireland. Dr J. Andy Harris, Associate Professor, Division of Social Science, New York University, Abu Dhabi.
Visions of Financial Order: National Institutions and the Development of Banking Regulation.Dr Kim Pernell, Assistant Professor of Sociology, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas.
Autumn Term
Digi-queer Criminology and Addressing the Rise of Anti-LGBTQ+ Hate. Dr Justin Ellis - co-hosted with The Mannheim Centre, Department of Social Policy.
Are Campaign Promises Effective? Dr Michael Ganslmeier (Department of Methodology, London School of Economics).
Analysing Age, Period, and Cohort effects using Scenario Trajectory Analysis with applications to political interest and social trust.Professor Patrick Sturgis and Professor Jouni Kuha (Department of Methodology, London School of Economics).
What chance of change? Reflections from participatory research on poverty across recurrent crises by Ruth Patrick and Maddy Power. Professor Ruth Patrick (Social Policy, University of York).
Why are things this way? Reflections on a coproduced artwork as research. Dr Eileen Alexander (Department of Methodology, London School of Economics).
Winter Term
Collecting public opinion in fragile and conflict states – the challenges and the rewards. Johnny Heald(CEO, ORB International).
Qualitative methods for studying social security benefits: methodological reflections on an ongoing project. Dr. Kate Summers (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Methodology).
Race, Class, and What Else? Policies and Politics in Four American Cities. Professor Jennifer Hochschild (Professor of Government & Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University).
Polarization over the Priority of Political Problems. Professor Benjamin Lauderdale, Professor of Political Science, University College London.
Temporalities and timelines in the aftermath of Grenfell.Professor Flora Cornish, Professor in Research Methodology, Department of Methodology.
Spring Term
Climate Change Migration: Lessons from a Longitudinal Mixed Methods Study of Hurricane Katrina. Professor Mary Waters, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University.
