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 inequalities, intolerance and government incompetence visible? I am a computational social scientist and I study the effects of new tech on politics and society.

Photo: Last day of teaching a seminar on behavioral economics and political campaigns

Contact: jan.zilinsky@tum.de

Curriculum Vitae

Google Scholar

About Me

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, and other peer-reviewed journals.

Technology & Politics

(Theme 1: 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.
(Theme 2: 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.

Political communication and 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 is about disinformation about the war in Ukraine.

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.

Reseach

Papers

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.
- Summary: Monkey Cage / Washington Post.
Donate to help us fight back: Political fundraising and toxic rhetoric online. With Silvia Kim and Brian Brew. 2024. Party Politics.
Justifying an Invasion: Where and Why is Disinformation Successful? (first author with many co-authors) R&R. Political Communication. Abstract.
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).
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, Nieman Journalism Lab, The Hill TV, Wall Street Journal, The Intercept, Tech Policy Press podcast, Columbia Journalism Review, Other
Geographic Boundaries and Local Economic Conditions Matter for Views of the Economy. 2023. Political Analysis. With James Bisbee. Paper | Code and data
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
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
Democratic deconsolidation revisited: Young Europeans are not dissatisfied with democracy.Research & Politics, 2019. PDF (open-access)
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
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

A group of students with their lecturer in an outside atrium

Telling stories with R and Data Visualization
(Winter 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2024)
- Code and course materials: https://zilinskyjan.github.io/DataViz/
Politics of Conspiracy Theories
(Every semester in academic years 2021-22, 2022-23 & 2023-24)
Campaigns, Elections, and Social Media (Winter 2022, Spring 2023)
Collecting Digital Trace Data
(Summer Institute in Computational Social Science)
- Lecture 1 (html; pdf)
- Lecture 2
- Lecture 3

Selected (non-peer-reviewed) articles

The Political Logic of Republicans Standing with Trump against the Squad (Washington Post, Monkey Cage analysis)
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).
Affective polarization and belief in voter fraud. (Washington Post - TMC, published shortly after the 1/6 riots.) Supplementary analysis
Trump supporters who think he didn’t keep his promises are more likely to vote for Joe Biden in 2020. (Washington Post - Monkey Cage)
Trying to understand how Jeff Flake is leaning? Ideological estimation with Twitter data.
- A methodological supplement explaining the method.
Raising Lower-Level Wages: When and Why It Makes Economic Sense (an article with Justin Wolfers)
Local Content Requirements: Backdoor Protectionism Spreading Under the Radar. With Cathleen Cimino-Isaacs. PIIE.
Fiscal tightening and economic growth. With Paolo Mauro. PIIE Policy Brief.

Recent talks

Miami, Zurich, Florence, Abu Dhabi & Munich