Andreas Küpfer andreas.kuepfer@tu-darmstadt.de
Version: MZES Social Science Data Lab, 2026-03-11
The analysis of multimodal political communication enables political scientists to study how politicians and parties behave in previously untapped ways. While large volumes of audiovisual data are increasingly available, these data are typically unstructured and vary substantially in quality, requiring robust and carefully designed processing pipelines. This talk guides through the challenges and opportunities of analysing political video data across institutional contexts. Analysing videos from local political meetings, including US school boards and state supreme courts, allows the generation of features such as transcriptions, gendered speech shares, and agenda items. However, the often semi-professional production quality of such recordings limits the systematic use of visual information. By contrast, legislative debate recordings are typically standardised and post-edited, enabling the leverage of visual features such as eye contact seeking to study the emergence of dominant behaviour during parliamentary speech. Scaling multimodal processing and feature extraction workflows across heterogeneous institutional contexts is, therefore, crucial. It enables the systematic study of political communication across levels of government and over longer time periods.
📝 Slides 1
Andreas Küpfer is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the DFG-funded project "Analysing Legislative Politics with Aligned Text, Audio and Image Data" at the Institute for Political Science of the Technical University of Darmstadt, holding a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Mannheim. He works at the intersection of Data Science and Political Science. His research focuses on (multimodal) political communication, combining computational with traditional methods to address substantive questions about party competition and political behaviour.