Communication Behavior in an Emerging Democracy

Abstract

During elections in emerging democracies, communication behavior can indicate the relative freedom of expression perceived by individuals and organizations. Communication is critical for citizens to stay informed and make sense of competing political visions, platforms, and candidates. In Fall 2014, three years after the Arab Spring uprising that originated in Tunisia and resulted in the overthrow of long-time dictator Ben Ali, Tunisian citizens went to the voting booth to elect members of parliament and the next president. These were the first regular presidential elections since the Tunisian Revolution of 2011 and the adoption of the Constitution in January 2014, and the first free and fair presidential elections since independence from French colonialism in 1956. To explore the level of political tolerance and freedom of expression in this emerging democracy, we examined the contents and metadata of tweets during the election period. We used computational techniques (e.g., natural language processing, topic modeling, data visualization, and social graphing) as well as manual inspection of tweets to identify the main topics of political discussion and related social interaction. Our findings show a lively and open expression of political opinions, candidate positions, and policy issues appearing during the period of the 2014 elections, suggesting an increasingly democratic society in Tunisia.

AI Augmented Approach to Identify Shared Ideas from Large Format Public Consultation

“…NLP-empowered analysis shines in examining the public's attitudes towards events (climate change, electricity price, political protest, etc.) and helping policy makers understand public concerns and interests for policy formation [23][24][25]. Similar examples can be found for healthcare applications, where NLP is applied to process health-related texts from social media and extract the medical insights, such as patient self-treatment experiences (symptoms and therapies) [26].…”

Bir Araştırma Kaynağı Olarak Arşivlenen Sosyal Medya Verilerinin Kullanımı

“…Bunun yanında siyasal iletişim de sosyal medyadaki iletişim araştırması alanlarından biridir. Bu çalışmalara bir örnek Kavanaugh, Song, Li ve Fox (2019), tarafından yapılan çalışmadır. Çalışmada seçimlerde siyasi hoşgörü ve iletişim özgürlüğünü araştırma amacıyla 2014 Tunus Parlamento ve Cumhurbaşkanlığı seçimlerinin üç aylık döneminde gönderilen Twitter içerikleri API'ler aracılığıyla toplanmıştır.…”