Join us for a talk by Andreas Küpfer from Technische Universität Darmstadt on the topic of "Look Who’s Confronting: Opposition Status, Gender, and the Far Right”, exploring how politicians use eye contact as a form of confrontation in parliamentary debates.
Abstract from the speaker:
Eye contact is fundamental to interpersonal communication, yet it remains an understudied element of political interactions. One key dimension of eye contact is its use in confrontational behaviour. Through confrontation, politicians assert and distinguish their own positions and challenge those of others. Despite its relevance, we know little about the dynamics of confrontation in political environments. Using automated visual analysis of all 15,553 video recordings from speeches in the 19th German Bundestag (2017–2021), I study when MPs seek eye contact with competing parties. The results suggest that eye contact functions as a marker of confrontational interaction—especially across party lines, and between opposition and government MPs. At the individual level, male MPs are much more likely to seek confrontational eye contact than female MPs. Confrontations with the Far Right are more frequent and negatively valenced, especially during immigration-related debates. Eye contact is crucial in improving our understanding of political interactions.
About the speaker:
Andreas Küpfer is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Political Science of the Technical University of Darmstadt, working at the intersection of Data Science and Political Science. Before that, he graduated from the University of Mannheim with a Master degree in Data Science. His research focuses on (multimodal) political communication, combining computational with traditional methods to address substantive questions on party competition and political behaviour. My work has been published in European Journal of Political Research, Political Analysis, and Political Science Research and Methods, among others. During my Ph.D., I have conducted research visits at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES, University of Mannheim) and the Centre for AI in Government (CAIG, University of Birmingham).
Bring your own lunch bag! Light pastries and drinks will be available in case you forget to bring it.
The Data Science Brown Bag Series is an informal and interactive gathering where participants bring their own brown bag lunch and engage in discussions on research and insights the field of data and computational social science (light pastries and drinks will be available if you forget your lunch bag!).
The series provides a platform for data enthusiasts, researchers, and practitioners to share their experiences, best practices, and emerging methodologies and research in using data science to analyze and understand social and political phenomena. The brown bag talk series is for anyone interested in data science and social science to network, learn, and share ideas in a casual and friendly setting.
- William Lowe, Senior Research Scientist
- Aliya Boranbayeva, Associate Communications and Events | Data Science Lab