Haotian Zhao

School of Journalism and Mass Communication

University of Wisconsin-Madison

haotian.zhao@wisc.edu

I am currently pursuing my Ph.D. in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with research interests lying at the intersection of Political Communication, Computational Methods, and Artificial Intelligence. I am also actively exploring and refining my research interests as I progress through my doctoral studies.

news

Jul 13, 2025	Honored to receive the Top Student Paper Award from ICA Political Communication Division! 🏆 Thankful for this honor and eager to build on this momentum 🚀
Jan 15, 2025	My first solo-authored paper accepted for presentation at ICA 2025 in Denver! 🎉 Looking forward to reuniting with familiar faces and making new connections in the Mile High City 🌄
Jul 03, 2024	Our paper was presented at IAMCR 2024 in Christchurch, New Zealand 🇳🇿 🎉
Jun 24, 2024	Participated in the Research Escalator at ICA Political Communication Division, gaining valuable feedback and insights 💡
Jun 19, 2024	Joined the ICA pre-conference Hackathon exploring dream classification using LLMs 🤖 Had a blast coding with brilliant teammates - turning dreams into data! 🚀

selected research papers

Does Country Context Matter? A Cross-National Multilevel Analysis of Political Polarizing Effect of Social Media

Haotian Zhao

In The 75th International Communication Association Conference, 2025

🏆 Top Student Paper Award
Harmony-In-Diversity? Examining How Social Media Use Influences Affective Polarization through the Mediating Effects of Cross-Cutting and Like-Minded Discussions

Haotian Zhao

In The 74th International Communication Association Conference, Gold Coast, Australia, Jun 2024
How Social Media Influences the Content and Structure of Youth Political Knowledge: the Moderating Effect of Need for Orientation

Haotian Zhao

In The 10th Forum on Political Communication and Social Development, Beijing, China, Nov 2023

🏆 Student Paper Award, In Chinese

selected projects

Visulization of Multilevel Modeling

A visual guide to multilevel modeling, showing how MLM handles nested data structures in cross-national research.

How Terrifying the Dream Is：A Word Embedding Approach

This project uses word embedding technology to quantitatively analyze and measure the emotional tone of dream descriptions, revealing the underlying sentiments of our subconscious narratives.

Analyzing Content Controversy in Online Communities Using Word Embedding

An experimental exploration of measuring controversy on Zhihu using word embeddings, revealing unexpected patterns in how controversial content drives user engagement.

Difference-in-Differences (DiD) in Journalism and Communication Studies

How Difference-in-Differences (DiD) analysis is applied in recent journalism and communication research

PopBert：Unveiling Populist Language in Political Discourse

In this project, I am learning and replicating the key steps in building the PopBERT model from the research "PopBERT. Detecting Populism and Its Host Ideologies in the German Bundestag" by Erhard et al. (2024). This study develops a transformer-based model to detect populist language in German parliamentary speeches, focusing on the moralizing references to "the virtuous people" and "the corrupt elite."