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Taegyoon Kim

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology · Social Sciences

About the Lab

Professor Taegyoon Kim's research lab focuses on the intersection of digital media, political behavior, and institutional governance. The lab investigates how online political communication—particularly on social media platforms like Twitter—shapes partisan polarization, political violence, and legislative responsiveness during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. A central theme is the role of political elites and subnational governments in influencing public opinion and policy attention through digital discourse. The lab also examines the structural dynamics of legislative networks and the long-term survival of post-authoritarian ruling parties.

political violencesocial medialegislative attentionpartisan polarizationdigital politics

Research Overview

Papers
8
Total Citations
66
Papers (5y)
8
Primary Field
Social Sciences

Research Output Trend

Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.

Publications per year (5y)
8total
2021
2022
2024
2025
Citations per year (5y)
66total
2021202220242025

Selected Papers

8
1
Article|40 citations·2022
Violent political rhetoric on Twitter
Taegyoon Kim
SJR Q1Political Science Research and MethodsOA

Abstract Violent hostility between ordinary partisans is undermining American democracy. Social media is blamed for rhetoric threatening violence against political opponents and implicated in offline political violence. Focusing on Twitter, I propose a method to identify such rhetoric and investigate substantive patterns associated with it. Using a data set surrounding the 2020 Presidential Election, I demonstrate that violent tweets closely track contentious politics offline, peaking in the day

CommunicationSocial Sciences
2
Article|21 citations·2021
Attention to the COVID‐19 Pandemic on Twitter: Partisan Differences Among U.S. State Legislators
Taegyoon Kim, Nitheesha Nakka, Ishita Gopal, Bruce Desmarais, Abigail Mancinelli, Jeffrey J. Harden, Hyein Ko, Frederick J. Boehmke
SJR Q1Legislative Studies Quarterly

Subnational governments in the United States have taken the lead on many aspects of the response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. Variation in government activity across states offers the opportunity to analyze responses in comparable settings. We study a common and informative activity among state officials—state legislators’ attention to the pandemic on Twitter. We find that legislators’ attention to the pandemic strongly correlates with the number of cases in the legislator’s state, the national cou

Sociology and Political ScienceSocial Sciences
3
Article|3 citations·2024
The national network of US state legislators on Twitter
Ishita Gopal, Taegyoon Kim, Nitheesha Nakka, Frederick J. Boehmke, Jeffrey J. Harden, Bruce Desmarais
SJR Q1Political Science Research and MethodsOA

Abstract Networks among legislators shape politics and policymaking within legislative institutions. In past work on legislative networks, the ties between legislators have been defined on those who serve in the same legislature or chamber. Online information networks, which have been found to play important roles in legislative communication at the national level, are not bounded by individual legislative bodies. We collect original data for over four thousand US state legislators and study pat

CommunicationSocial Sciences
4
Article|2 citations·2025
The Effects of Partisan Elites’ Violent Rhetoric on Support for Political Violence
Taegyoon Kim
SJR Q1Political BehaviorOA

Abstract Violent partisan hostility is a growing concern for American democracy, yet the role of partisan elites in driving support for political violence remains underexplored. This is especially problematic given their significant influence over public opinion. How does partisan elites’ rhetoric threatening violence affect support for violence against opposing partisans? Focusing on social media, where violent messages by partisan elites from both sides can reach a wide audience with potential

Sociology and Political ScienceSocial Sciences
5
Article|0 citations·2025
Legacies of party origins on the electoral performance of former authoritarian ruling parties
Taegyoon Kim, Wonjun Song
SJR Q1DemocratizationOA

This article investigates why some former authoritarian ruling parties survive and succeed after democratic transitions, while others decline. We argue that parties formed before the onset of authoritarian rule (“pre-seizure” parties) are better positioned to endure and compete under democracy than those established after authoritarian consolidation (“post-seizure” parties). Pre-seizure parties, having developed strong party brands independent of authoritarian resource advantages, are more resil

Sociology and Political ScienceSocial Sciences
6
dataset|0 citations·2021
Replication Data for: Attention to the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter: Partisan differences among U.S. state legislators
Taegyoon Kim, Nitheesha Nakka, Ishita Gopal, Bruce Desmarais, Abigail Mancinelli, Jeffrey J. Harden, Hyein Ko, Frederick J. Boehmke
Harvard DataverseOA

Replication codes and data for "Attention to the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter: Partisan differences among U.S. state legislators"

Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science
7
Article|0 citations·2025
Whose Palestine Is It? A Topic Modelling Approach to National Framing in Academic Research
Maida Aizaz, Taegyoon Kim, L. S. Kim
OA

In this study, we investigate how author affiliation shapes academic discourse, proposing it as an effective proxy for author perspective in understanding what topics are studied, how nations are framed, and whose realities are prioritised.Using Palestine as a case study, we apply BERTopic and Structural Topic Modelling (STM) to 29,536 English-language academic articles collected from the OpenAlex database.We find that domestic authors focus on practical, local issues like healthcare, education,

General Social SciencesSocial Sciences
8
Article|0 citations·2025
A benchmark dataset for evaluating gender sensitivity in Korean political discourse with large language models
Sunkyoung Park, Eunbi Cho, Chuck C. Jung, Woo Chang Kang, Taegyoon Kim, E. K. Park, Sanghoun Song
SJR Q1Scientific DataOA

Large language models are increasingly applied to political discourse, but their ability to detect culturally grounded gender sensitivity remains underexplored. We introduce KOGENT, a benchmark dataset of 1,222 transcripts from the Korean National Assembly, annotated for gender sensitivity across 6,024 utterances. Each utterance is labeled as high or low in gender sensitivity, based on contextual indicators of bias, discrimination, or inclusion, and tagged for the target group. KOGENT spans Kore

General Social SciencesSocial Sciences

Research Areas

Sociology and Political ScienceCommunicationGeneral Social SciencesArtificial Intelligence

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