We present a novel method for tracking the evolution of political dogwhistles—messages which are only understood by a select in-group, while going unnoticed by others (out-group)—in digital environments. Tracking dogwhistles poses a unique empirical challenge due to their reliance on linguistic ambiguity and intentional concealment. To address this, our method combines computational semantics and survey methodology. We model the contextual distribution of dogwhistle terms in online discussion forums, enabling us to infer semantic representations over time, including interpretations not universally recognized by all readers. Diachronic word embeddings are compared with data from a linguistic replacement task that elicits paraphrases reflecting in-group and out-group interpretations. This allows us to track the gradual semantic change of dogwhistles with regard to their in-group and out-group meanings. We demonstrate our method by analyzing the life cycles of four immigration-related dogwhistles across two Swedish online discussion forums over a 23-year period (2000–2022). Our findings reveal different trajectories of semantic change, both across terms and between communities, highlighting the dynamic and context-dependent nature of dogwhistle communication. 

This article investigates how citizens' understanding of multivocal political words - dogwhistles - changes over time and varies between groups. Dogwhistles are ambiguous political messages that convey a veiled meaning to a targeted subset of the audience but are inaudible to others. They present challenges from the standpoint of democratic representation and the principles of open and informed deliberation. We use survey data from a two-wave panel word replacement test, in which respondents were asked to replace a word or multiple words in a sentence so that the meaning of the sentence remained about the same. Manual coding was used to separate dogwhistle payload replacement words from replacement words with the explicit meaning. Comparing the replacement test in the two waves and between groups, we chart the life cycle of dogwhistles and explore group differences in the ability to decode their implicit payload. We find examples of both dogwhistle semantic stability and change. The analysis demonstrated an increase in the share of respondents who inferred 'good order in migration policy' as meaning stricter migration policy between the two waves. The likelihood of decoding the implicit dogwhistle message was linked to individual-level factors, such as age, party affiliation, social media and radical right-wing media use. By exploring semantic change using a novel approach, this paper leaves a unique contribution to the study of strategic ambiguity in political communication.

An informed public is essential to democratic representation, and the news media have traditionally played a central role in supporting this ideal. However, the changing media environment and a rise of misinformation have raised new questions about how citizens acquire and retain political knowledge, prompting distinctions between the uninformed and those holding directional or evidence-resistant misbeliefs. We extend this discussion by arguing that even individuals who are factually accurate may not necessarily be politically knowledgeable, as directional beliefs can sometimes coincide with correct information. We address this both theoretically-by integrating concepts of certainty and attitudes toward evidence-and empirically, by analyzing belief patterns across political issues using Swedish survey data (N = 2,268). Our findings suggest that individuals can be knowledgeable on some issues yet holding directional (mis)beliefs on others, selectively aligning with facts that support their views. These belief patterns are not associated with traditional news use but correlate with alternative news consumption.

The term dogwhistle refers to an expression conveying a message to a subset of an audience which is not perceived by the rest of the group, in addition to a primary meaning directed at the group at large. We follow up on previous work in linguistics and political communication on defining dogwhistles, taking into account how they likely function in real-life political contexts. We consider the utility of dogwhistles in terms of their sensitivity and their specificity, which allows us to consider dogwhistles in terms of an idealized "life cycle", whose phases we describe in terms of a multi-dimensional utility tradeoff, described in terms of dogwhistle users, the benefit they expect to receive from dogwhistling, and the deniability of controversial dogwhistle meanings. We propose an approach for the longitudinal study of dogwhistles, and describe the first stages of an experiment to characterize dogwhistles in terms of their lexical properties.

While numerous studies have documented an association between mainstream media trust and mainstream media use, only little is known about potential causal mechanisms underlying the association. We theorize that selective exposure, social influence, and the reinforcing spirals model offer three possible mechanisms that may underlie the association. These possibilities were studied using random intercept cross-lagged panel models and latent curve models on a four-wave panel data set (n = 3,540). For mainstream media, the results show an asymmetrical reinforcing spiral, in which the effect of mainstream media trust on use can be considered as one of yielding maintenance, while the impact of media use on mainstream media trust to a limited degree is in line with the notion of a spiral gradually (though inconsistently) increasing trust over time. We also find that use of right-wing alternative media consistently and sometimes robustly leads to decreasing mainstream media trust.

Amid ongoing debates over integration failures in Europe, this article examines an important yet understudied area: public perceptions of integration. Previous studies have largely focused on isolated aspects of public opinion, especially cultural elements, offering limited insights into how citizens define successful integration and perceive policy shortcomings. This article expands the scope with a data-driven, two-step approach that enables an open exploration of integration attitudes, unconstrained by predefined categories. Using open-ended responses, it captures citizens' views on what they deem essential for successful integration, while latent class analysis is applied to identify distinct groups with shared perspectives. Substantively, the analysis provides insights into the diverse nature of public opinion on integration, challenging oversimplified measures and bringing to light previously overlooked patterns. Methodologically, it offers a flexible framework for examining public opinion, forming a basis for future cross-country comparisons seeking to enhance our understanding of public sentiment on integration.

We show that meaning shifts in political dogwhistle expressions (DWEs) are explained by the expressions changing with regard to their “hidden” (in-group) and “public” (out-group) dimensions. We study the association between computational measures of Lexical Semantic Change (LSC) and the In-group/Out-group Ratio (IOR) of four Swedish DWEs. We use a combination of distributional modeling of DWEs in the online discussion forum Flashback and data collected from a lexical replacement survey of Swedish residents. We explore several vector-space meaning representation approaches and demonstrate that distributional methods can be used to identify semantic shifts relevant to dogwhistle development, particularly contextual representations from Swedish BERT, SBERT, and multilingual T5. 

Political parties have incentives to appeal to diverse voters to maximize support. This study examines the effect of politicians exploiting dogwhistles-expressions that convey hidden messages to specific audiences while escaping notice by the majority-for this purpose. Findings from a word replacement test and a survey experiment assessing the utility of racial dogwhistles in Sweden suggest that dogwhistling can aid politicians in gaining support from in-groups while retaining backing from out-groups; for example, "suburban gang" (dogwhistle) elicits more support than "immigrant gang." Results suggest that dogwhistling is effective beyond the U.S. context and for different forms of political support.

One implication of the transition to high-choice media environments is that what information people are exposed to depend less on journalistic curation and more on social, algorithmic, and personal curation. This has sparked a renewed interest in the concept of political opinion leaders, who are often assumed to be more interested in and informed about politics and society. Theoretically, political opinion leaders could hence help disseminate information to less interested and informed. At the same time, there are theoretical reasons for why political opinion leaders may be more prone to politically motivated reasoning, which may lead them to believe in and disseminate misinformation. Thus far, there is only limited research on whether political opinion leaders are more informed than others that also takes into consideration that some facts are contested, whereas other facts are uncontested. Hence, this paper seeks to investigate the relationship between political opinion leadership and knowledge, distinguishing between (a) uncontested and (b) contested facts. Among other things, findings show that those who score high in political opinion leadership traits in general are not more knowledgeable about contested and uncontested facts.

In most studies on news repertoires and the linkage between media use and (mis)perceptions of social and political matters, the use of political alternative media has not been included. In this paper, we therefore investigate how people combine both traditional and political alternative media into different media repertoires, and how these media repertoires are related to misperceptions. We rely on a two-wave panel survey, conducted in 2020 and 2021, with a probability-recruited sample of the Swedish population. Measures on the use of a wide range of media, including political alternative ones, are used to conduct a Latent Profile Analysis. This analysis distinguishes five media repertoires in the data. The results show that these repertoires coincide with different levels of misperceptions, with those dominated by TV use showing higher levels of misperceptions and those with higher newspaper and alternative media use showing lower levels of misperceptions. Results also show that media repertoires do not affect over-time changes in misperceptions.