My current research focuses on two topics. The first is the use of voting-advice applications, or VAAs, in Finnish politics. The second is civic and political engagement in a comparative Nordic perspective. In both cases, I rely on survey data and have a more specific interest in connections to ideologies and political identities. I'm also currently exploring the use of Bayesian methods.
My past research has looked at understanding, conceptualizing and measuring affective political polarization in complex multiparty systems, such as Finland, and at the use of social media for political participation, advocacy, and electoral campaigning. I've worked with survey data, social media data sets, computational methods, social network analysis, and online ethnography.
Leveraging insights from the Finnish context, my dissertation discusses how affective polarization – which refers to political polarization characterized by negative attitudes between political groups – should be understood and conceptualized in multiparty systems.
We studied the commemoration of the fifth anniversary, in March 2016, of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster on English-speaking Twitter using a combination of social network analysis and critical discourse analysis. We found that while most of the retweeted messages contained a ritual element of collective memory work, grief, and observance, another prominent feature was the strongly politicized discourse surrounding the aftermath of the disaster.
