Park, Sun Young, “The Sequential Rise of Political Animosity in Economically Declining and Prospering Places: Evidence from 3 Billion Geo-located Tweets”
Political animosity has become a central feature of contemporary democratic politics. Existing narratives often interpret this as either a ‘bottom-up socioeconomic phenomenon’ focusing on voters’ economic discontent, or a more ‘top-down political phenomenon’ driven by partisan political conflict or populist rhetoric. I adjudicate between these views by proposing a place-based sequential theory: Economic discontent fueled political animosity in relatively declining places before the rise of populists, while the consequent rise of populists provoked political animosity particularly in prospering places. To test this theory, I apply deep learning models to 3 billion geo-located tweets, offering a novel measure of political animosity that is geographically fine-grained and spanning a decade (2013-2022) in the U.S., France, and Korea. In all three countries, declining places displayed higher animosity prior to salient populist campaigns. These places include not only areas with industrial decline, but also areas with high concentrations of ethnic minorities or long-distance commuters. In contrast, it was prosperous places that experienced the sharpest increases in animosity with the rise of populists, closing the gap with declining areas.
Presented at the APSA 2024, Council for European Studies 2024
“Animosity in Place: The Geography of Political Animosity, its Economic Origins, Political Catalysts, and Social Antidotes”
See the full Dissertation Synopsis here.
Park, Sun Young, “Stereotyping Women with Sympathy: Youth Political Socialization in Mixed-Gender Environments”, Political Behavior (2025)
Youth is a critical period where future citizens can develop both gender stereotypes and sympathy for gender out-groups. In this article, I draw attention to an under-studied aspect of youth socialization, gender compositions of peer environments, and theorize that it influences stereotyping of women in political roles as well as political sympathy for gender out-groups. To test this theory, I use a natural experiment in Korea: the quasi-random assignment of students to co-ed and single-gender secondary schools. Collaborating with a provincial office of education, I field an original survey of adolescents in this setting and obtain comprehensive records of school assignment processes to calculate each respondent’ probability to be assigned to either type of school. Controlling for this with inverse propensity score weighting, I show that adolescents assigned to mixed-gender environments express higher support for policies that imply sympathy with gender out-groups, but also exhibit more intense socialization to gender stereotypes with larger gender gaps in political engagement and a stronger tendency to use gender labels when evaluating politicians. Together, these results suggest mixed-gender environments can lead to sympathetic but stereotyping political attitudes regarding gender, while single-gender environments can produce less sympathetic but less stereotyping gender-related political attitudes. This demonstrates that gender stereotyping of women in political roles and sympathy towards gender out-groups are distinct dimensions of political attitudes, and there can be trade-offs between them in the effects of a socialization environment.
Park, Sun Young, Jacob R. Brown, and Ryan D. Enos, “How Political Geography Shapes Political Expression: Effects of Political Composition, Competition, and Representation”
Presented at the APSA 2024, Directions of Polarization Conference 2023