The use of social media in EU policy communication and implications for the emergence of a European public sphere

Cohesion policy is the European Union’s (EU) main investment policy and seeks to strengthen economic, social and territorial cohesion. While accomplishments in this regard are constantly measured, European citizens are not always aware of the policy’s impact and the role the EU plays therein. This is especially relevant as the communication of EU policies is central to the emergence of a European public sphere, an acknowledged condition for European integration. In this paper, we aim at advancing research in this regard through the analysis of cohesion policy communication on the social media channels of ten Local Managing Authorities (LMAs) responsible for managing and communicating structural funds at the local level. By building on a bottom-up construction of shared meaning structures through semi-automatic analysis techniques, we make the following three observations: first, social media communication is indicative of "horizontal Europeanization"; second, Europeanization occurs both in the form of the spontaneous amalgamation of shared discontent expressed by citizens and the institutionalization of top-down EU communication measures adopted by LMAs; and third, a cluster of topics articulated internationally and showcasing a negative attitude towards the EU funding scheme suggests that, counter-intuitively, Euroscepticism seems to facilitate the emergence of a European public sphere

Who is willing to deliberate, and how? Dissatisfied democrats, stealth democrats and populists in the UK: SEI Working Paper 131

This article draws on a new survey of British citizens to test the hypothesis that there are two quite distinctive types of attitude prevalent among those who are ‘disaffected’ with politics, the ‘dissatisfied democratic’ and ‘stealth democratic’ orientations, the former being more widespread in the UK. While neither manifests a high level of trust for the political elite, the dissatisfied democratic citizen is politically interested, efficacious and desires greater political participation, while the contrary is generally true of the stealth democrat. However, although stealth democrats are unwilling to engage in most forms of participation or deliberation, they are ambiguous about direct democracy, which can be attributed to the populist nature of stealth democratic attitudes

El uso de las redes sociales en la comunicación política de la UE y las implicaciones para el surgimiento de una esfera pública europea

Cohesion policy is the European Union’s (EU) main investment policy and seeks to strengthen economic, social and territorial cohesion. While accomplishments in this regard are constantly measured, European citizens are not always aware of the policy’s impact and the role the EU plays therein. This is especially relevant as the communication of EU policies is central to the emergence of a European public sphere, an acknowledged condition for European integration. In this paper, we aim at advancing research in this regard through the analysis of cohesion policy communication on the social media channels of ten Local Managing Authorities (LMAs) responsible for managing and communicating structural funds at the local level. By building on a bottom-up construction of shared meaning structures through semi-automatic analysis techniques, we make the following three observations: first, social media communication is indicative of ‘horizontal Europeanization’; second, Europeanization occurs both in the form of the spontaneous amalgamation of shared discontent expressed by citizens and the institutionalization of top-down EU communication measures adopted by LMAs; and third, a cluster of topics articulated internationally and showcasing a negative attitude towards the EU funding scheme suggests that, counter-intuitively, Euroscepticism seems to facilitate the emergence of a European public sphere.La política de cohesión es la principal política de inversión de la Unión Europea (UE) y busca fortalecer la cohesión económica, social y territorial entre las regiones europeas. Aunque los logros en este sentido se miden constantemente, los ciudadanos europeos no siempre son conscientes del impacto de la política y del papel que desempeña en ella la UE. Esto es especialmente relevante ya que la comunicación de las políticas de la UE es fundamental para el surgimiento de una esfera de comunicación pública europea, una condición reconocida para la integración europea. En este artículo, nuestro objetivo es avanzar en la investigación en este respecto a través del análisis de la comunicación de la política de cohesión en los canales de redes sociales de diez Autoridades Administrativas Locales (LMA en inglés) responsables de administrar y comunicar los proyectos financiados a través de estos fondos estructurales a nivel local. En este artículo utilizamos técnicas de análisis semiautomáticos del texto para reconstruir la estructura de significados que constituye las comunicaciones de las LMA en las redes sociales, y llegamos a los siguientes tres resultados: primero, la comunicación en las redes sociales es indicativa de "europeización horizontal"; segundo, la europeización ocurre tanto en la forma de la combinación espontánea del descontento compartido expresado por los ciudadanos, como en la institucionalización de las formas de comunicación originadas centralmente en la UE y adoptada localmente por las LMA; y tercero, encontramos varios temas articulados internacionalmente y que muestran una actitud negativa hacia el esquema de financiación de la UE. Este resultado sugiere que, al contrario de lo que podría parecer, el euroescepticismo parece facilitar el surgimiento de una esfera pública europea

The use of social media in EU policy communication and implications for the emergence of a European public sphere

Cohesion policy is the European Union\u2019s (EU) main investment policy and seeks to strengthen economic, social and territorial cohesion. While accomplishments in this regard are constantly measured, European citizens are not always aware of the policy\u2019s impact and the role the EU plays therein. This is especially relevant as the communication of EU policies is central to the emergence of a European public sphere, an acknowledged condition for European integration. In this paper, we aim at advancing research in this regard through the analysis of cohesion policy communication on the social media channels of ten Local Managing Authorities (LMAs) responsible for managing and communicating structural funds at the local level. By building on a bottom-up construction of shared meaning structures through semi-automatic analysis techniques, we make the following three observations: first, social media communication is indicative of \u2018horizontal Europeanization\u2019; second, Europeanization occurs both in the form of the spontaneous amalgamation of shared discontent expressed by citizens and the institutionalization of top-down EU communication measures adopted by LMAs; and third, a cluster of topics articulated internationally and showcasing a negative attitude towards the EU funding scheme suggests that, counter-intuitively, Euroscepticism seems to facilitate the emergence of a European public sphere

Preface

DAMSS-2018 is the jubilee 10th international workshop on data analysis methods for software systems, organized in Druskininkai, Lithuania, at the end of the year. The same place and the same time every year. Ten years passed from the first workshop. History of the workshop starts from 2009 with 16 presentations. The idea of such workshop came up at the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics. Lithuanian Academy of Sciences and the Lithuanian Computer Society supported this idea. This idea got approval both in the Lithuanian research community and abroad. The number of this year presentations is 81. The number of registered participants is 113 from 13 countries. In 2010, the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics became a member of Vilnius University, the largest university of Lithuania. In 2017, the institute changes its name into the Institute of Data Science and Digital Technologies. This name reflects recent activities of the institute. The renewed institute has eight research groups: Cognitive Computing, Image and Signal Analysis, Cyber-Social Systems Engineering, Statistics and Probability, Global Optimization, Intelligent Technologies, Education Systems, Blockchain Technologies. The main goal of the workshop is to introduce the research undertaken at Lithuanian and foreign universities in the fields of data science and software engineering. Annual organization of the workshop allows the fast interchanging of new ideas among the research community. Even 11 companies supported the workshop this year. This means that the topics of the workshop are actual for business, too. Topics of the workshop cover big data, bioinformatics, data science, blockchain technologies, deep learning, digital technologies, high-performance computing, visualization methods for multidimensional data, machine learning, medical informatics, ontological engineering, optimization in data science, business rules, and software engineering. Seeking to facilitate relations between science and business, a special session and panel discussion is organized this year about topical business problems that may be solved together with the research community. This book gives an overview of all presentations of DAMSS-2018.DAMSS-2018 is the jubilee 10th international workshop on data analysis methods for software systems, organized in Druskininkai, Lithuania, at the end of the year. The same place and the same time every year. Ten years passed from the first workshop. History of the workshop starts from 2009 with 16 presentations. The idea of such workshop came up at the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics. Lithuanian Academy of Sciences and the Lithuanian Computer Society supported this idea. This idea got approval both in the Lithuanian research community and abroad. The number of this year presentations is 81. The number of registered participants is 113 from 13 countries. In 2010, the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics became a member of Vilnius University, the largest university of Lithuania. In 2017, the institute changes its name into the Institute of Data Science and Digital Technologies. This name reflects recent activities of the institute. The renewed institute has eight research groups: Cognitive Computing, Image and Signal Analysis, Cyber-Social Systems Engineering, Statistics and Probability, Global Optimization, Intelligent Technologies, Education Systems, Blockchain Technologies. The main goal of the workshop is to introduce the research undertaken at Lithuanian and foreign universities in the fields of data science and software engineering. Annual organization of the workshop allows the fast interchanging of new ideas among the research community. Even 11 companies supported the workshop this year. This means that the topics of the workshop are actual for business, too. Topics of the workshop cover big data, bioinformatics, data science, blockchain technologies, deep learning, digital technologies, high-performance computing, visualization methods for multidimensional data, machine learning, medical informatics, ontological engineering, optimization in data science, business rules, and software engineering. Seeking to facilitate relations between science and business, a special session and panel discussion is organized this year about topical business problems that may be solved together with the research community. This book gives an overview of all presentations of DAMSS-2018

BAN-PL: a Novel Polish Dataset of Banned Harmful and Offensive Content from Wykop.pl web service

Advances in automated detection of offensive language online, including hate speech and cyberbullying, require improved access to publicly available datasets comprising social media content. In this paper, we introduce BAN-PL, the first open dataset in the Polish language that encompasses texts flagged as harmful and subsequently removed by professional moderators. The dataset encompasses a total of 691,662 pieces of content from a popular social networking service, Wykop.pl, often referred to as the "Polish Reddit", including both posts and comments, and is evenly distributed into two distinct classes: "harmful" and "neutral". We provide a comprehensive description of the data collection and preprocessing procedures, as well as highlight the linguistic specificity of the data. The BAN-PL dataset, along with advanced preprocessing scripts for, i.a., unmasking profanities, will be publicly available