Discourse polarization index: Analysis of top-down and ground-up political discourses in Portugal

An increasing number of events across the world have been a warning for democracy stability in established democratic countries. Events such as Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán publicity doubting that liberal democracies could remain globally competitive, and the increasing voting share of anti-establishment parties in European member states are consequences of the political polarization phenomenon which endangers our democracy. To understand if we are becoming more polarized, literature has been focusing on measuring political polarization through surveys and voting data, without consistent evidence for any trend. Although the theoretical definition of political polarization has found stability in the literature, the different forms of measuring it have not. The measurement of political polarization needs to be more robust and extended to mass society besides elite society, enabling a comparison between the two, and within the real life and the digital. This dissertation answers this need, measuring political polarization, using text-as-data and computational social science methods, in an effective way independent of manual tasks, language, survey or pooling, polarization’s actors, and environments. It uses an empirical framework applied to parliamentary discourses and Twitter data to create a Discourse Polarization Index (DPI) which enables the assessment of the evolution of political polarization in discourse, considering its state and process. Portugal is used as use case, showing an increase in political polarization from 2015 to 2021, for the elite and the mass society, with similar behaviour between the two groups. A semantic validation is done, and research future steps are given.Diversos acontecimentos mundiais põem em causa a estabilidade democrática nos países democráticos. Destacando-se o comentário do primeiro-ministro húngaro, Viktor Orban, que declarou que as democracias atuais podem não ser competitivas globalmente, justificando a inclinação por uma autocracia, assim como o número crescente de partidos antissistema na Europa ocidental. Ambos os eventos são consequência da polarização política, um fenómeno que tem vindo a pôr em risco as democracias ocidentais. Para perceber a tendência, a literatura tem-se focado na medição quantitativa da polarização política através de questionários e sondagens, sem nenhuma tendência identificada. A quantificação da polarização política precisa de ser mais robusta e estudar também a polarização da massa publica, para além da elite, sendo possível assim a comparação da polarização entre os dois grupos, mas também entre os ambientes em que interagem, na vida real ou no digital. Esta dissertação responde a essa necessidade, medindo a polarização política, usando texto e métodos de ciências sociais computacionais, independente da língua, dos questionários, das sondagens e de tarefas manuais. A dissertação usa um modelo matemático empírico aplicado ao discurso parlamentar e a dados retirados do Twitter para criar o Índice de Polarização no Discurso. Este índice permite avaliar a evolução da polarização no discurso, considerando as suas características de estado e processo. Portugal é usado como caso de estudo, mostrando um aumento da polarização política entre 2015 e 2021, para a elite e massa pública, com comportamentos semelhantes. É efetuada uma validação semântica e são dadas recomendações para próximos passos de investigação

Statewide and Regionalist Parties’ Perspectives in the Long-Term Dynamics of Decentralization

The doctoral dissertation with the title “Statewide and Regionalist Parties' Perspectives in the Long-Term Dynamics of Decentralization” engages with patterns of decentralization over time in comparative perspective. How the multi-level state is organized is fundamental for territorial politics, and therefore why decentralization occurs is an important factor to understand the democratic system and how policy-making difficulties arise. This dissertation embraces a post-functionalist, rational choice assumption about political parties: governing statewide parties decentralize in their own interest. Otherwise, why would they distribute power? Additionally, an innovative neo-institutionalist perspective argues that, over time, arising multi-level institutions influence statewide parties’ calculations endogenously to subsequently decentralize. The establishment of regional democracy through the major reform of political decentralization should empower regional actors, and influence statewide parties’ strategies of decentralization. The dissertation also includes two new methodological procedures. In chapter 2, an analysis of decentralization dynamics over time (1950-2018) and in 19 democracies unveils that regional democracy affects statewide parties’ asymmetric decentralization decisions. Before political decentralization, ideological proximity between the center and regions with decentralization demands seems to predict decentralizing reforms. This pattern disappears after political decentralization, possibly due to statewide governments giving up on ideological considerations vis-à-vis regional executives. Furthermore, party-based explanations of asymmetric decentralization cannot be found in symmetric decentralization, highlighting the latter’s idiosyncrasy. In chapter 3, based on co-authored work with Leonce Röth and Lea Kaftan, we develop a procedure to generate optimized dictionaries to measure attention dynamics to territorial politics based on newspaper texts in Spain (1976-2019) and the UK (1900-2020), two prominent and complex cases of decentralization. We show how to efficiently develop this important text-as-data resource to compare attention patterns across political arenas (mass media and parliament). By measuring salience of the territorial issue and its sub-issue over time, we find that media emphasizes violence-related territorial sub-issue more, whereas parliament focuses on administrative and technical issues such as a fiscal authority decentralization. In chapter 4, also based on a co-authored investigation with Lea Kaftan and Leonce Röth, we argue that party positions conveyed by the media are key to understand the voter-party convergence link in democratic representation. Mediated party positions can help us fill the gap in territorial politics concerning party positions on territorial sub-issues. We develop a procedure to obtain mediated party positions from news text with sentiment analysis and topic models in an automatized manner. Accounting for news outlet differences and comparing our measures with established expert judgments, manifesto positions, and estimates based on parliamentary debates, we find valid mediated positions for statewide and regionalist parties on four territorial sub-issues in Spain

Essays in political text: new actors, new data, new challenges

The essays in this thesis explore diverse manifestations and different aspects of political text. The two main contributions on the methodological side are bringing forward novel data on political actors who were overlooked by the existing literature and application of new approaches in text analysis to address substantive questions about them. On the theoretical side this thesis contributes to the literatures on lobbying, government transparency, post-conflict studies and gender in politics. In the first paper on interest groups in the UK I argue that contrary to much of the theoretical and empirical literature mechanisms of attaining access to government in pluralist systems critically depend on the presence of limits on campaign spending. When such limits exist, political candidates invest few resources in fund-raising and, thus, most organizations make only very few if any political donations. I collect and analyse transparency data on government department meetings and show that economic importance is one of the mechanisms that can explain variation in the level of access attained by different groups. Furthermore, I show that Brexit had a diminishing effect on this relationship between economic importance and the level of access. I also study the reported purpose of meetings and, using dynamic topic models, show the temporary shifts in policy agenda during this period. The second paper argues that civil society in post-conflict settings is capable of high-quality deliberation and, while differing in their focus, both male and female can deliver arguments pertaining to the interests of broader societal groups. Using the transcripts of civil society public consultation meetings across former Yugoslavia I show that the lack of gender-sensitive transitional justice instruments could stem not from the lack of women’s 3 physical or verbal participation, but from the dynamic of speech enclaves and topical focus on different aspects of transitional justice process between genders. And, finally, the third paper maps the challenges that lie ahead with the proliferation of research that relies on multiple datasets. In a simulation study I show that, when the linking information is limited to text, the noise can potential occur at different levels and is often hard to anticipate in practice. Thus, the choice of record linkage requires balancing between these different scenarios. Taken together, the papers in this thesis advance the field of “text as data” and contribute to our understanding of multiple political phenomena

Multilingual estimation of political-party positioning: From label aggregation to long-input Transformers

Scaling analysis is a technique in computational political science that assigns a political actor (e.g. politician or party) a score on a predefined scale based on a (typically long) body of text (e.g. a parliamentary speech or an election manifesto). For example, political scientists have often used the left--right scale to systematically analyse political landscapes of different countries. NLP methods for automatic scaling analysis can find broad application provided they (i) are able to deal with long texts and (ii) work robustly across domains and languages. In this work, we implement and compare two approaches to automatic scaling analysis of political-party manifestos: label aggregation, a pipeline strategy relying on annotations of individual statements from the manifestos, and long-input-Transformer-based models, which compute scaling values directly from raw text. We carry out the analysis of the Comparative Manifestos Project dataset across 41 countries and 27 languages and find that the task can be efficiently solved by state-of-the-art models, with label aggregation producing the best results.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 202

Computational Conflict Research

This open access book brings together a set of original studies that use cutting-edge computational methods to investigate conflict at various geographic scales and degrees of intensity and violence. Methodologically, this book covers a variety of computational approaches from text mining and machine learning to agent-based modelling and social network analysis. Empirical cases range from migration policy framing in North America and street protests in Iran to violence against civilians in Congo and food riots world-wide. Supplementary materials in the book include a comprehensive list of the datasets on conflict and dissent, as well as resources to online repositories where the annotated code and data of individual chapters can be found and where (agent-based) models can be re-produced and altered. These materials are a valuable resource for those wishing to retrace and learn from the analyses described in this volume and adapt and apply them to their own research interests. By bringing together novel research through an international team of scholars from a range of disciplines, Computational Conflict Research pioneers and maps this emerging field. The book will appeal to students, scholars, and anyone interested in the prospects of using computational social sciences to advance our understanding of conflict dynamics

Sentiment Analysis of Political Tweets From the 2019 Spanish Elections

The use of sentiment analysis methods has increased in recent years across a wide range of disciplines. Despite the potential impact of the development of opinions during political elections, few studies have focused on the analysis of sentiment dynamics and their characterization from statistical and mathematical perspectives. In this paper, we apply a set of basic methods to analyze the statistical and temporal dynamics of sentiment analysis on political campaigns and assess their scope and limitations. To this end, we gathered thousands of Twitter messages mentioning political parties and their leaders posted several weeks before and after the 2019 Spanish presidential election. We then followed a twofold analysis strategy: (1) statistical characterization using indices derived from well-known temporal and information metrics and methods –including entropy, mutual information, and the Compounded Aggregated Positivity Index– allowing the estimation of changes in the density function of sentiment data; and (2) feature extraction from nonlinear intrinsic patterns in terms of manifold learning using autoencoders and stochastic embeddings. The results show that both the indices and the manifold features provide an informative characterization of the sentiment dynamics throughout the election period. We found measurable variations in sentiment behavior and polarity across the political parties and their leaders and observed different dynamics depending on the parties’ positions on the political spectrum, their presence at the regional or national levels, and their nationalist or globalist aspirations

The decentralization game. Leaders' speeches and what characteristics determine their position on decentralisation

How do party leaders manage their position over sub-national identity? Thus, how do party leaders manage the number of MPs from the party in government from territories with high sub-national identity, intra-party, the number of MPs from the ethno-regionalist parties, inter-party, the audience where the speech is done, the Parliament and the party conference, and the influence of an independence referendum in their speeches position about decentralization? In countries with multilevel institutions, intra-party groups and ethno-regionalist parties with different sub-national identities coexist, and these differences likely hold importance for parties and leaders. Also, the different audiences and venues, influence the leaders’ speech position when referring to decentralization. In this thesis, I study how leaders change their speech when they speak in front of other MPs in front of their party members and supporters. Furthermore, I examine how independence referendums affect leaders’ positions on the same topic. How the referendum changes the leaders’ perception and position on decentralization? In this dissertation, I argue that MPs elected from high sub-national identity territories, the state-wide parties branches MPs from the same territories, the different audiences, and the independence referendums influence the position leaders take over the issue of decentralization. I use an original dataset of speeches from the Spanish and UK parliaments, investiture and Queen’s speeches, specifically, and from the party conferences in Spain and the United Kingdom to position leaders’ speeches on decentralization. I developed a decentralization scale to predict the leaders’ positions using automated text analysis method Wordscores. The results demonstrate that the number of MPs, the audience, and having an independence referendum do influence and position the national party leader’s speeches on decentralization. These implications have different connotations in the United Kingdom and Spain. These results impact the studies on decentralization, intra-party discussion, and independence referendums. Moreover, I contribute to the study of speeches and quantitative text analysis using manifestos mentions on decentralization, analyzing the different speeches venues, and stating that a relevant political event, such as the independence referendum, modifies national leaders’ positions on decentralization.How do party leaders manage their position over sub-national identity? Thus, how do party leaders manage the number of MPs from the party in government from territories with high sub-national identity, intra-party, the number of MPs from the ethno-regionalist parties, inter-party, the audience where the speech is done, the Parliament and the party conference, and the influence of an independence referendum in their speeches position about decentralization? In countries with multilevel institutions, intra-party groups and ethno-regionalist parties with different sub-national identities coexist, and these differences likely hold importance for parties and leaders. Also, the different audiences and venues, influence the leaders’ speech position when referring to decentralization. In this thesis, I study how leaders change their speech when they speak in front of other MPs in front of their party members and supporters. Furthermore, I examine how independence referendums affect leaders’ positions on the same topic. How the referendum changes the leaders’ perception and position on decentralization? In this dissertation, I argue that MPs elected from high sub-national identity territories, the state-wide parties branches MPs from the same territories, the different audiences, and the independence referendums influence the position leaders take over the issue of decentralization. I use an original dataset of speeches from the Spanish and UK parliaments, investiture and Queen’s speeches, specifically, and from the party conferences in Spain and the United Kingdom to position leaders’ speeches on decentralization. I developed a decentralization scale to predict the leaders’ positions using automated text analysis method Wordscores. The results demonstrate that the number of MPs, the audience, and having an independence referendum do influence and position the national party leader’s speeches on decentralization. These implications have different connotations in the United Kingdom and Spain. These results impact the studies on decentralization, intra-party discussion, and independence referendums. Moreover, I contribute to the study of speeches and quantitative text analysis using manifestos mentions on decentralization, analyzing the different speeches venues, and stating that a relevant political event, such as the independence referendum, modifies national leaders’ positions on decentralization