Panel Session 5
Political Psychology of Democratization Laboratory
Methodological Frontiers in the Political Psychology of Democratization
Moderator
Dr. Cristina Jayme Montiel
Academician, National Academy of Science and Technology
Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology
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Dr. Joshua Uyheng
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
Director, Political Psychology of Democratization Laboratory
April 23, 2026 (Thursday)
1:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Contemporary social scientific inquiry stands on innovative frontiers marked by the integration of cutting-edge computational methods with critical theorizing. In political psychology, scholarship on democratizing states engages with questions of collective meaning and action in contexts of social and technological change. Critical approaches to computational methods provide a rich toolkit for engaging these processes with both analytical breadth and depth. This panel demonstrates these principles and their application through research by the Political Psychology of Democratization Laboratory. ​
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​The first presentation outlines a theoretical discussion of critical foundations for computational methods in political psychology. These foundations serve as an orienting lens for the design and implementation of critical-computational methods in the three empirical studies showcased in the second, third, and fourth panel presentations. The second presentation maps rhetorical variations in pandemic leadership across multiple global contexts. The third presentation examines how online communities make sense of disinformation during the 2022 national elections in the Philippines. Finally, the fourth presentation traces shifts in the discursive construction of flooding in the Philippines over a twenty-five year period, culminating with the 2025 anti-corruption protests related to recent flood control scandals.
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In sum, this panel highlights a conceptually grounded and methodologically expansive framework for utilizing critical-computational methods in tackling key questions in the political psychology of democratization, especially highlighting issues of agency, collectivity, and dynamism in contemporary societies.
Critical Foundations for Computational Methods in Political Psychology
Dr. Cristina Jayme Montiel
Department of Psychology
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Dr. Joshua Uyheng
Department of Psychology
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Computational methods have recently made inroads across the social scientific disciplines, including political psychology as an exemplar case. However, the integration of computational methods into social scientific inquiry has largely been discussed in terms of technical assimilation into existing methodological pipelines, leaving more foundational questions unaddressed. Without considering these issues, computational methods risk reproducing longstanding critiques of mainstream social scientific research: in particular, an individualized, decontextualized, instrumentalized, and Western-centric approach. This presentation offers a framework for critically appraising the role of computational methods in social scientific research through the lenses of ontology, epistemology, ethics, and reflexivity. Across these dimensions, we propose an ontological shift from individuals to collectives, an epistemological shift from lab-based to naturalistic ways of knowing, an ethical shift from extractivism to accountability, and a reflexive shift from the Western center to the Global South margins. We illustrate these principles through case studies in political psychology research in the Philippines and beyond.
Mapping Rhetorical Variations in the Languages of Pandemic Leaderships
Dr. Cristina Jayme Montiel
Department of Psychology​
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Dr. Joshua Uyheng
Department of Psychology
This paper demonstrates how to quantify qualitative data, by producing comparative computational maps of the speeches of political heads of state during a global crisis. Our raw data consisted of publicly available speeches (N = 1201) by 26 world leaders, posted on YouTube and political websites during the COVID-19 pandemic. Employing a critical approach to computational text analytics, we show that state heads rhetorically lead their nations by: enforcing systemic interventions, upholding global unity, encouraging communal cooperation, stoking national fervor, and assuring responsive governance. Principal component analysis further shows that country-level rhetoric is organized along two underlying dimensions: an agency-structure axis and a hierarchy-egalitarianism axis. Furthermore, we detect a striking contrast between countries featuring populist versus cosmopolitan rhetoric, which diverged in terms of their collective meaning-making around 'leading over' versus 'leading with', as well as their experienced pandemic severity. We conclude with implications for understanding global crisis leadership in an unequal world and the contributions of critical-computational approaches to the social sciences.
Positioning in Online Disinformation Communities during the 2022 Philippine Elections
Nmanuel de Leon, Jr.
Department of Psychology​
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Dr. Joshua Uyheng
Department of Psychology
Predominant disinformation research focuses on cognitive processes to explain why individuals fall for false information. However, this overlooks how consumers actively and creatively co-construct disinformation in social interactions within communities. Our study investigates how people collectively make sense of disinformation by analyzing comments on YouTube videos of a pro-Bongbong Marcos vlogger during the 2022 Philippine elections. Using an explanatory sequential mixed methods design, we first identified clusters of meaning through topic modeling and then examined how consumers negotiated meanings, identities, and moral orders through positioning analysis. Our findings reveal that the co-construction of disinformation orients towards both winning the elections and subsequently legitimizing the Bongbong Marcos presidency. Storylines of protecting the Marcos-Duterte tandem and attacking the opposition mobilize support for electoral victory while storylines of professing the truth with the vlogger and reclaiming the Marcos historical greatness contribute to validating the BBM administration. These discursive processes further demonstrate the agentic and productive nature of disinformation consumption as they enable consumers to achieve different political objectives in changing contexts. From this perspective, addressing disinformation requires multilevel interventions from community-based fact-checking to institutional reforms that enable meaningful participation among individuals.
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Denaturalizing Disaster: Tracing Discursive Shifts in Twenty-Five Years of Flooding Coverage in the Philippines
Ariana Jewel P. Enriquez
Department of Psychology​
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Dr. Joshua Uyheng
Department of Psychology
For democracies in tropical climates like the Philippines, disasters such as widespread flooding are scientifically understood as the product of both natural hazards and human activity. Drawing on a discursive psychological lens, we argue that how publics make sense of disasters goes beyond explaining their origins. Discursive constructions of disasters produce moral fields which politically position individuals, communities, and institutions like the state as accountable subjects. Moreover, we posit that such constructions are not static, but historically embedded and change over time. Leveraging a data corpus of mainstream news coverage, we trace the evolution of these discursive constructions of flooding in the Philippines. We specifically utilize articles published from 2000-2025, concluding with the 2025 anti-corruption protests as a contextually informed endpoint. Through a combination of computational and qualitative analysis, we trace a nonlinear yet systematic shift toward constructions of flooding not as ‘natural’ events but ‘political’ failures of governance. We also examine the surrounding contexts of discursive shifts throughout the examined time periods. We discuss implications of these results for dominant discourses on disaster risk management and the value of a computational-discursive approach to understanding political psychological meaning-making over time in democratizing states.
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