POMLAB (Public Opinion & Media Lab) is a research hub dedicated to the study of public opinion, political communication, and symbolic power in digital and hybrid media environments. It focuses in particular on how social media contribute to broader symbolic processes through which collective identities, group affiliations, and social and political boundaries are constructed and contested.
Based in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, POMLAB investigates how citizens receive political messages, negotiate symbolic classifications, and respond emotionally to mediated content – depending on their social positions, temporal conditions, and communicative contexts.
Over the years, mostly using digital data and survey experiments, POMLAB has contributed to national and international research on:
– Experimental studies on prejudice, recognition, and symbolic ambivalence
– Digital movements of opinion and the short-lived resurgence of collective emotional forces on social media
– Identity (de)activation and gender polarization in digital contexts
– Emotional responses to political content (memes, AI-generated messages)
The lab also promotes critical reflection on the limits of ‘communicationalism’ – the tendency to overstate the role of isolated textual or visual elements in political communication. Instead, it emphasizes how symbolic content becomes meaningful and effective through its entanglement with broader structural conditions, such as social group positions, institutional settings, and technological affordances.
Current lines of research include:
– Symbolic dissonance and affective reactions to political quasi-memes
– Generational and gender gaps in digital opinion formation
– The epistemic power of AI in shaping perceptions of reality
– The perception and credibility of AI-generated content in political communication
We welcome collaboration from scholars, students, and research partners interested in connecting public opinion research with the analysis of symbolic meaning, group classifications, and the conditions that underpin political communication and identity formation.