Erika Franklin Fowler
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efranklinfowler.bsky.social
Erika Franklin Fowler
@efranklinfowler.bsky.social

Prof @ Wesleyan U; Co-Director of WesMediaProject (@wesmediaproject.bsky.social & mediaproject.wesleyan.edu); policomm, polisci, public opinion & health policy scholar; member of Collaborative on Media & Messaging for Health & Social Policy (commhsp.org) .. more

Erika Franklin Fowler is an American political scientist. She is a Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, having previously served as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. .. more

Communication & Media Studies 40%
Political science 24%
Latest KFF poll on US confidence in vaccines, fed agencies, new vax sched., & RFK Jr.

Lots of info. E.g.:
-large majorities confident in MMR, Polio, Hep B, & flu vax safety; parents less so for these & COVID vax but not Hep B.
-<1/2 confident in feds making child vax rec's (but how abt states?)
πŸ›ŸπŸ˜·
KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust: Trust in the CDC and Views of Federal Childhood Vaccine Schedule Changes | KFF
Weeks after the Trump administration reduced the number of childhood vaccine recommended for routine use, public trust in the CDC is at its lowest since the COVID-19 pandemic, and less than half are c...
www.kff.org
The APSA Political Communication section is accepting nominations for its annual awards. Please send nominations directly to the chair of each committee.

πŸ”Ž More details on awards, committee, and eligibility criteria:
politicalcommunication.org/awards/
Former @fda.gov Commissioner Dr. @scottgottliebmd.bsky.social, who sits on the boards of Pfizer and UnitedHealthcare, told @facethenation.bsky.social that the current measles outbreak could be a "long cycle, especially now that this has gotten embedded in political psyche in this country."
Dr. Scott Gottlieb on measles outbreak β€” CBS News
Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who sits on the boards of Pfizer and UnitedHealthcare, told
apple.news
πŸŽ‰ New paper out in Political Behavior (with @gijsschumacher.bsky.social & @mrooduijn.bsky.social)

Why do some people feel stronger emotions about politics than others?
πŸ’‘Not political knowledge, but interest and confidence-in-knowledge drive emotional engagement.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
🧡
Disentangling the Sophistication-Emotion Link: Political Interest and Confidence-in-Knowledge, but not Knowledge, Drive Emotional Responses - Political Behavior
Why do some people feel stronger emotions about politics than others? Past work suggests that political sophistication, consisting of knowledge and interest, is related to feeling strong emotions abou...
link.springer.com
πŸ§‘β€πŸ€β€πŸ§‘Do politicians consider the gender of leaders when selecting coalition partners?

➑️Using a conjoint on 979 Spanish mayors, @albahuidobro.bsky.social finds that mayors, especially those on the center and left, prefer coalitions with parties led by women www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView

Relevant for #wesgov214
How do media storms occur?
What are the dynamics. Clear graphic in "Catching Fire in the News: The Necessary Conditions for Media Storms" by Amber Boydstun & colleagues

#polcomm #commsky @snsoroka.bsky.social πŸ”₯

πŸš€πŸš€πŸš€ Book is available #OpenAccess #free:

www.cambridge.org/core/element...
πŸ’– Just added to the schedule! πŸ’– Join us for the webinar "Disappearing Data: Monitoring Federal SOGI Data Losses and Advancing Accountability."

πŸ—“οΈ Date: Tuesday, February 10, 2026
πŸ•› Time: 10–11 a.m. ET
πŸ”— Register: myumi.ch/g3dmq

#SOGIdata #LoveData26 #ICPSRDataFair
How do media storms occur?
What are the dynamics. Clear graphic in "Catching Fire in the News: The Necessary Conditions for Media Storms" by Amber Boydstun & colleagues

#polcomm #commsky @snsoroka.bsky.social πŸ”₯

πŸš€πŸš€πŸš€ Book is available #OpenAccess #free:

www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Great thread 🧡 with important evidence ⬇️ #wesgov214
Last week the story was that TikTok censored anti-Trump/ICE/Pretti videos after the U.S. ownership change. We investigated with a large set of US TikTok data and found some interesting results, short thread...

Flagging for #wesgov214 discussions
one million questions about local news is a lot. but it's still a tiny fraction of overall usage. OpenAI has said ChatGPT has 800 million weekly users. www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/chat...
ChatGPT is asked about local news 1 million times per week, OpenAI says
ChatGPT is fielding 1 million prompts about local news every week, OpenAI said in a blog post that also announced the AI company wants to take "a different path" on local news than other tech companie...
www.niemanlab.org
Last week the story was that TikTok censored anti-Trump/ICE/Pretti videos after the U.S. ownership change. We investigated with a large set of US TikTok data and found some interesting results, short thread...

Congratulations! Wonderful news!

Relevant for #wesgov214 discussions
The CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Pat Harrison, just delivered her last words to the board. "Together, we will prove that a nation of neighbors will survive."
The CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Pat Harrison, just delivered her last words to the board. "Together, we will prove that a nation of neighbors will survive."
KFF @kff.org Β· 11d
ACA sign-ups dropped by about 1.2 million consumers compared to the 24.2 million who signed up around this time last year, according to CMS’s latest Open Enrollment snapshot.

See our updated #QuickTake, which reflects the latest data from CMS on ACA sign-ups: https://on.kff.org/4qQlwXS
ACA Sign-Ups Are Down by Over a Million People, But It’s Still an Incomplete Picture
Data currently being released represent Open Enrollment Marketplace plan selections, or how many people have signed up for or been automatically renewed into 2026 coverage. These data do not necessari...
www.kff.org
"How do class gaps compare to race and gender gaps? Strikingly, we find that the class gaps in tenure-track academia are as large as or larger than analogous race or gender gaps."
In academia, class background strongly shapes who advances and who stalls.
🚨 New from me: Grant review at more than half of NIH's institutes could be frozen by the end of the year.

That's because crucial NIH grant-review panels are slated to be empty at those institutes by Jan 2027.

A wonky bureaucratic problem with big implications.

A short 🧡
Exclusive: key NIH review panels due to lose all members by the end of 2026
Thirteen of the agency’s advisory councils, which must review grant applications before funding is awarded, are on track to have no voting members.
www.nature.com
🚨(Software) Update:

In my PhD, I had a side project to fix an annoying problem: when you ask 5 people to label the same thing, you often get different answers. But in ML (and lots of other analyses), you still need a single aggregated answer. Using the majority vote is easy–but often wrong.

1/N
GitHub - dirkhovy/MACE: Multi-Annotator Competence Estimation tool
Multi-Annotator Competence Estimation tool. Contribute to dirkhovy/MACE development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
New paper w/ Kulesza & @cmwitko.bsky.social

A worry about campaign contribution limits is that they don't stop money, they just shift it to Citizens United/SpeechNow "independent expenditures"

We find that this didn't happen. Keep calm & regulate on

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/nk11m...

1/n
Fiona Rodger and @cwolbrecht.bsky.social draw connections between support for democracy, attitudes toward right-wing authoritarianism, and support for transgender rights after the 2024 election.

www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...
Transgender Attitudes and Anti-Democratic Sentiment After the 2024 Election
In recent years, conservative actors have decried what they call β€œgender ideology,” defined as efforts to recognize the complexity of sexuality and gender beyond the simple binary. We first review the...
www.degruyterbrill.com
AMSTERDAM ❀️ ALSO BEAUTIFUL IN WINTER 😍 πŸŽΏπŸ§€

One more week to apply to this postdoc position in Political Communication @ascor.bsky.social

Thank you for sharing 🫢

Please reach out if you have any questions.

@polcomm.bsky.social @fgkommpol.bsky.social @alessandronai.bsky.social
🚨 the best state policy & public opinion database is now online. ~200 (!!!) state policies and 80 public opinion series on abortion, labor, taxes, environment, guns, education…

dynamicdemocracy.shinyapps.io

Massive public goods provision from @devincaughey.bsky.social & @chriswarshaw.bsky.social
Please share - @pewresearch.org wants to hire a data archivist who will be an advocate for data users, helping to ensure that our datasets are easy to discover and reuse by researchers, journalists, and the public.
pewtrusts.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/CenterExtern...
🚨NEW PAPER
The Logic of Connective Faction:
How Digitally Networked Elites and Hyper-Partisan Media Radicalize Politics
w/ @yunkangyang.bsky.social & @mikecowburn.bsky.social

Online radicalization doesn't just affect the public.
It also reshapes how elites & parties behave. doi.org/10.1080/1058...
The Logic of Connective Faction: How Digitally Networked Elites and Hyper-Partisan Media Radicalize Politics
Across democratic systems, ideological cleavages increasingly emerge not only between but also within political parties. At the same time, hyperpartisan and digitally networked media ecosystems amp...
doi.org

Wonderful and well deserved news!! Congratulations!! β€οΈπŸŽ‰β€οΈ
1/4. The U.S. continues to be a place where people’s life experiences and outcomes differ dramatically by social positioning. How does that affect the way people make meaning of what is happening around them? Those questions guided this new paper. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
The destruction of the enterprise of US academic science has been one of the most confounding aspects of a hugely confounding year. My @statnews.com colleagues are writing about the consequences for individuals & the country.
You want to read this series.
www.statnews.com/american-sci...
American Science, Shattered
An eight-decade partnership between universities and the federal government made U.S. science preeminent. It took Trump less than a year to shred that
www.statnews.com
🚨 Predoc Opportunity at Yale! 🚨

Care about research that changes policy?

My research team works within state government to advance evidence and learning for a smarter safety net!

And our predocs have excellent PhD placements. Apply here!

#EconSky #EconTwitter #Predoc #ResearchJobs #HealthPolicy
Economics of the Safety Net
tobin.yale.edu