Gray money in politics – those contributions that don’t fall under transparency regulations but cannot be made completely anonymous either, for example sponsorships of political parties’ events – could change our understanding of money as a signal. However, the fact that neither political parties nor firms are obliged to disclose such transactions makes studying them difficult. In the talk, I will present one approach to measure gray money on the basis of tweets from party conferences.

Anna earned her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Mannheim and her Master’s degree from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. Her current research analyzes the distinct incentives within the regulatory frameworks governing political party finances in Germany and the United States. Additionally, she explores the impact of consumer behavior on firms’ decisions to be vocal about their political donations and take controversial political stances.

In recent years, we have seen an increase in the incidences of radical protests about climate change in response to lackluster mitigation efforts worldwide. Historically, the environmental movement as a whole has long been an issue space where women have held prominent leadership positions. However, role congruity theory posits that women – due to being perceived as more passive and docile than men – may not be regarded as “proper” leaders of social movements, especially when such movements use radical tactics. How does the interaction of protest tactics and leadership gendering affect support for the current climate movement? In this paper, we report the results of a pilot survey experiment to address this question. Respondents were exposed to mock news stories about climate protests where they received one of four treatment conditions that varied the protest characteristics between combinations of radical/traditional tactics and women leadership/gender of leadership not specified. Respondents were then asked to report on their level of support for the movement, level of support for the protest, and the likelihood of the movement’s success. We also asked respondents to write in their most important reason for supporting the movement or not, to which we applied basic topic modelling to extract key themes. Ultimately, our pilot results show support for notion that radical protest tactics harm both support and perceptions of the movement, but that gender of the protest leadership does not make a significant difference. We believe that the latter result is most likely due to weakness of the gender treatment in the survey experiment, so future iterations of this work will seek to develop a stronger prime for this component of our analysis.

Katie is a current fourth year Joint PhD Candidate in Political Science and Scientific Computing. Her research is primarily about factors that influence climate change discourse and public opinion, and her dissertation will focus on the effects of optimism and pessimism on climate attitudes.