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Curriculum Vitae

Google Scholar

Blog

Book

Twitter

Github: kmunger

Email: kmm7999@psu.edu

Present Address

Pond Lab

State College, PA

CVPublicationsTeachingMedia CoverageEmail: kmm7999@psu.edu

Welcome!

I am the Jeffrey L. Hyde and Sharon D. Hyde and Political Science Board of Visitors Early Career Professor of Political Science and Assistant Professor of Political Science and Social Data Analytics at Penn State University. I study the communication of political information on the internet, and how to make digital social science make sense.

I have a blog discussing social science methodology, political communication theory and the practice of culture and politics --- and how the internet has changed each of them. I am also a contributor to the august Crooked Timber.

Here's a "Mind Map" of my research so far, organized into four main sections.

My current book project is titled The YouTube Apparatus, and it builds on my research on the supply and demand for content to analyze fifteen years of data from political channels on YouTube. The book is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press (Elements series); you can download the final draft here .

My first book, Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture, was published by Columbia University Press in the summer of 2022. The book theorizes "Boomer ballast" as a major force in the 2020s and 2030s, a force directly in tension with the ephochal shifts in information technology.

Buy the book here!

Peer-Reviewed Publications

"Political Deepfakes Are As Credible As Other Fake Media And (Sometimes) Real Media" (with Christopher Lucas and Soubhik Barari) . (Conditionally Accepted) Journal of Politics, 2023

"'Reenviado Muchas Veces': How Platform Warnings Affect WhatsApp Users in Mexico and Colombia" (with Angel Villegas-Cruz, Jorge Gallego, and Mateo Vásquez-Cortés). Political Communication, 2024

"Temporal Validity as Meta-Science" . Research & Politics , 2023

"Generations in Contemporary US Politics: Statistical Aggregations or Collective Political Actors?" (with Eric Plutzer). Politics, Groups & Identities, 2023

"Fifteen Seconds of Fame: TikTok and the Supply Side of Social Video" (with Benjamin Guinaudeau and Fabio Votta). Computational Communication Research , 2022. APSA ITP award for Best Paper published in in 2022

Replication Materials

"Digital literacy and online political behavior" (with Andy Guess). Political Science Research & Methods, 2022

Replication Materials

"The Effect of Streaming Chat on Perceptions of Political Debates" (with Victoria Asbury-Kimmel, Katherine McCabe, Tiago Ventura and Keng-Chi Chang). Journal of Communication, 2021

"The Upworthy Research Archive: A Time Series of 32,488 Experiments in U.S. Advocacy" (with J. Nathan Matias, Marianne Aubin Le Quere, and Charles Ebersole). Nature: Scientific Data, 2021

Replication Materials

"Meaningful measures of human society in the twenty-first century" (with David Lazer, Eszter Hargittai, Deen Freelon, Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, Katherine Ognyanova and Jason Radford ). Nature, 2021

"Connective Effervescence and Streaming Chat During Political Debates" (with Katherine McCabe, Tiago Ventura and Keng-Chi Chang). Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 2021

"You Won't Believe Our Results! But They Might: Heterogeneity in Beliefs About The Accuracy of Online Media" (with Jonathan Nagler, Joshua Tucker and Mario Luca). Journal of Experimental Political Science, 2021

Replication Materials

"Accessibility and Generalizability: Are Social Media Effects Moderated by Age or Digital Literacy?" (with Jonathan Nagler, Joshua Tucker and Ishita Gopal). Research & Politics, 2021

Replication Materials

"Political Knowledge and Misinformation in the Era of Social Media: Evidence from the 2015 U.K. Election" (with Patrick Egan, Jonathan Nagler, Jonathan Ronen and Joshua Tucker) British Journal of Political Science, 2020

Replication Materials

"#polisci Twitter: A Descriptive Analysis of how Political Scientists 2020 Use Twitter in 2019" (with Jim Bisbee and Jennifer Larson) Perspectives on Politics, 2020

Replication Materials

"Right-Wing YouTube: A Supply and Demand Perspective" (with Joseph Phillips) International Journal of Press/Politics, 2020

Replication Materials

"All the News That’s Fit to Click: The Economics of Clickbait Media." Political Communication, 2020

"Experimentally Reducing Partisan Incivility on Twitter" Journal of Experimental Political Science, 2020

Replication Materials

"The (Null) Effect of Clickbait" (with Jonathan Nagler, Joshua Tucker and Mario Luca). Public Opinion Quarterly, 2020

"Tweeting for Peace: Experimental Evidence from the 2016 Colombian Plebiscite" (with Jorge Gallego, Juan D. Martinez y Mateo Vasquez). Electoral Studies, 2019

"Elites Tweet to Get Feet Off the Streets: Measuring Regime Response to Protest Using Social Media" (with Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler and Joshua Tucker). Political Science Research & Methods, 2019

Replication Materials

"Measuring and Explaining Political Sophistication Through Textual Complexity" (with Arthur Spirling and Ken Benoit). American Journal of Political Science, 2019

Replication Materials 'sophistication' R package

"How Accurate Are Survey Responses on Social Media and Politics?" (with Andrew Guess, Jonathan Nagler and Joshua Tucker). Political Communication, 2019

"Tweetment Effects on the Tweeted: An Experiment to Decrease Online Harassment". Political Behavior, 2017. APSA EPVOB award for Best Paper published in Political Behavior in 2017

Replication Materials

"Choosing in Groups: Analytical Politics Revisited" (with Michael C. Munger). Cambridge University Press, 2015

Other Academic Publications

"Quantitative Description of Digital Media" (with Eszter Hargittai and Andrew Guess). Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 2021

"The Dumbing Down of the State of the Union? Trends in the Complexity of Political Communication" (with Arthur Spirling and Ken Benoit). In Can American Govern Itself? (ed. Nolan McCarty and Frances Lee), Cambridge University Press

"Social Media, Political Science and Democracy". Journal of Politics, 2019.

"The Limited Value of Non-Replicable Field Experiments in Contexts with Low Temporal Validity". Social Media + Society, 2019.

Selected Popular Press

Tipping the Scale Real Life, March 2022

Hello Goodbye Real Life, April 2021

The Rise and Fall of the Palo Alto Consensus The New York Times, July 2019

Teaching

I have taught several semesters of Introduction to Data Science, using both R and Python, as well many courses on Text as Data. Course materials are located on my github, and are free for anyone to use, either for teaching or learning.

Slides and RMarkdown files for a summer Intro to Data Science course I taught at Universidad de Rosario

Jupyter notebooks for Intro to Data Science

R code for Text as Data

Course materials for Spring 2023 can be found here:

PhD Course in Causal Inference

Course materials for Fall 2022 can be found here:

Advanced undergraduate course in Text as Data

Course materials for Fall 2021 can be found here:

Advanced undergraduate course in Text as Data

PhD Seminar in Media, Social Media and Politics

Course materials for Fall 2019 can be found here:

Advanced undergraduate course in Text as Data

PhD Seminar in Media, Social Media and Politics

Selected Media Coverage

Politicians now tend to be older than they've been historically. It's causing issues NPR, August 2023

The Age of Chat The New Yorker, June 2023

What Was Twitter, Anyway? The New York Times Magazine, April 2023

TikTok Politics and the Era of Embodied Memes The Atlantic, October 2022

YouTube is awash with election misinformation — and it isn’t taking it down Vox, November 2020

Why the Trump campaign is going all-in on YouTube Vox, November 2020

Maybe It’s Not YouTube’s Algorithm That Radicalizes People Wired, November 2019

How the Cambridge Analytica scandal unravelled Vox, October 2019

Old, Online, And Fed On Lies: How An Aging Population Will Reshape The Internet BuzzFeed News, April 2019

How Norms Change The New Yorker, October 2017

Bots aren’t just service tools—they’re a whole new form of media Quartz, April 2017

Telling People to Be Less Racist Online Works, Sometimes New York Magazine, November 2016

Why Online Allies Matter in Fighting Harassment The Atlantic, November 2016

Troll hunters: the Twitterbots that fight against online abuse New Scientist, August 2016