Franziska Barbara Keller

In my research, I have applied SNA to informal institutions in authoritarian regimes to explain why some elites become part of the inner circle while others get purged and how leaders can rule without holding official positions. More recently, I have examined political AstroTurfing (hidden propaganda campaigns) on social media, using SNA to reveal the coordination networks underlying such operations. We have studied one of the earliest known Twitter AstroTurfing campaign - implemented by the South Korean secret service during the 2012 Presidential election - and showed that networks of coordinated messaging help us identify such campaigns and are the result of principal-agent problems theorized in social science. Such network patterns are present even in the most recent such campaigns, as we discuss in our contribution to the Washington Post, and have subsequently shown in an article in Nature's Scientific Reports.  With my colleagues at icmb, I study Covid-19 related misinformation in Switzerland.

 

In earlier research (Journal of East Asian Studies), I have argued for conceptualizing elite politics as happening in networks instead of between factions. I have shown that it is possible to construct political elite networks in closed regimes using publicly available data, and have evaluate different approaches to do so. In research awarded the John Sprague Award of APSA's Political Networks Section, I have tested a series of such more complex hypotheses on a network constructed from the career paths and promotion patterns of the top Chinese political elites. I show that while direct connections to alleged faction leaders raise the chance of entering the inner circle (the Politburo), so do ties to other elites. Central network positions predict appointments up to a decade ahead. But not all friends in high places are helpful. In a bureaucracy riven with struggles such as China's, connections to anyone but the most powerful figure in a province may actually reduce promotion chances (Political Studies). In ongoing research, I explore automated ways to extract information on elite networks from unstructured text, such as newspaper articles, biographies, or expert reports on elite politics in China and the United States.

 

​I have received my PhD from New York University's Department of Politics in 2015, was a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University's Harriman Institute in 2015/2016 and a visiting scholar at UCSD's School of Global Policy & Strategy (on an SNF Postdoc.Mobility grant). 2016-2021, I served as assistant professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's Division of Social Science.