Cross-national measurement of polarization in political discourse: Analyzing floor debate in the U.S. the Japanese legislatures

Sakamoto, Takuto; Takikawa, Hiroki

doi:10.1109/bigdata.2017.8258285

Cited by 10 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Political and social scientists are responsible for less than half the number of included studies as computer scientists (n = 14), and just 12 studies involve multidisciplinary research. Of these, seven involve both computer scientists and political or social scientists (Kapočiūtė-Dzikienė & Krupavičius, 2014;Lapponi, Søyland, Velldal & Oepen, 2018;Rheault, 2016;Rheault, Beelen, Cochrane & Hirst, 2016;Rudkovsky et al, 2018;Sakamoto & Takikawa, 2017;Van der Zwaan, Marx & Kamps, 2016), three collaboration between linguists and computer scientists (Honkela et al, 2014;Iyyer, Enns, Boyd-Graber & Resnik, 2014;Nguyen et al, 2013), and two that include researchers from three different fields (Diermeier, Godbout, Yu & Kaufmann, 2012;Nguyen, Boyd-Graber, Resnik & Miler, 2015). According to the number of studies published on this subject annually, interest in this area has been increasing over time, particularly in recent years (see Figure 2.…”

Section: Research Backgroundsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…And Nguyen et al (2013) perform supervised topic modeling to capture ideological perspectives on issues to produce coarse-grained speaker ideology analysis. Topic modeling as also undertaken by Sakamoto & Takikawa (2017), who use it to analyze polarization, a task also tackled by Jensen et al (2012). Meanwhile, Vilares & He (2017) also perform opinion-topic modeling to extract speakers' perspectives-"the arguments behind the person's position"-on different topics.…”

Section: Tasksmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sakamoto & Takikawa (2017) andProksch et al (2018) comparing their approaches (to the analysis of the level of polarization (ideological division) in parliaments) on transcripts from two or more different chambers. The US Congress is by far the most popular legislature for analysis, attracting the attention of 31 of the studies.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Sentiment and position-taking analysis of parliamentary debates: a systematic literature review

Abercrombie

Batista-Navarro

2020

J Comput Soc Sc

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Parliamentary and legislative debate transcripts provide access to information concerning the opinions, positions and policy preferences of elected politicians. They attract attention from researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds, from political and social sciences to computer science. As a result, the problem of automatic sentiment and position-taking analysis has been tackled from different perspectives, using varying approaches and methods, and with relatively little collaboration or cross-pollination of ideas. The existing research is scattered across publications from various fields and venues. In this article we present the results of a systematic literature review of 61 studies, all of which address the automatic analysis of the sentiment and opinions expressed and positions taken by speakers in parliamentary (and other legislative) debates. In this review, we discuss the available research with regard to the aims and objectives of the researchers who work on these problems, the automatic analysis tasks they undertake, and the approaches and methods they use.We conclude by summarizing their findings, discussing the challenges of applying computational analysis to parliamentary debates, and suggesting possible avenues for further research.

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Section: Research Backgroundsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Tasksmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sentiment and position-taking analysis of parliamentary debates: a systematic literature review

Abercrombie

Batista-Navarro

2020

J Comput Soc Sc

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“…In the wider field of political science, considerable progress has been made with the "text as data" approach [11,33,34], with many studies measuring various partisan and/or ideological differences by extensively using political texts such as speech transcripts of legislators (e.g., Congressional Record for the US Congress) [35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. Somewhat belatedly, International Relations (IR) has also started to embrace this development.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-national analysis of global security discourse using word embeddings

Sakamoto

2020

Preprint

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Recent methodological advances in quantitative text analysis enable a not only more rigorous, but also more systematic, investigation of the discursive dynamics that are unfolding among various international actors, in comparison with preceding approaches. This study conducts such an investigation in the context of policy deliberations on international peace and security, by performing cutting-edge text analysis on the entire body of meeting records of the Security Council of the United Nations for the past quarter of a century (1994-2019). Focusing on one of the most consequential notions for the council's policy-making, "threat to the peace," this study employs an unsupervised machine learning model, broadly termed "word embedding," to analyze how this notion has been discussed by relevant members of the council, especially its five permanent members, during the period under investigation. Word embedding estimates the semantic relationships among all words found in a given set of documents, by assigning a high-dimensional vector representation to each of these words. In combination with other natural language processing techniques and simple statistical operations, it reveals persistent patterns of cross-national convergence and divergence in security discourse. While these findings are mostly consistent with existing empirical observations on council politics, some are not, including, most notably, a considerable degree of correlation in how to conceive international threats found between the close-knit Western allies in the council and their Russian counterpart. The study also tracks changing conceptions of threats over time, unveiling distinctive aspects of international relations in each period that have strongly affected the evolution of these conceptions.

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“…Existing computational social science literature suggests that political disagreement and issue ownership can be understood by quantitatively analyzing relative emphasis on different terms, ideas, and arguments in political texts (Baum 2012;Lowe 2008;Sakamoto and Takikawa 2018). Based on US legislative data, Gerrish and Blei (2012) outlined legislators' policy positions on specific issues and, using supervised machine learning, explored how the language of laws is correlated with political support.…”

Section: Structural Topic Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Migration Policy Framing in Political Discourse: Evidence from Canada and the USA

Hajdinjak

Morris

Amos

2019

Computational Social Sciences

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How do parties discuss migration policy in legislative speeches? Legislative bodies are an arena for verbal conflicts where the parties vie for their ideological interests but also sharpen new rhetorical figures. Political parties develop policy stances strategically different from those of competing parties and elucidate those stances through legislative debates and public statements. A large body of literature argues that some issues, like migration, fall in a gap between established societal cleavages over which parties do not have robust, issue-specific ownership. More recent research suggests migration may be a part of a new transnational cleavage that pits cosmopolitan sensibilities against nationalist sentiments in a conflict over issue ownership and policy framing. Building off this debate, we hypothesize that parties discuss migration topics by diverting attention to subcomponents of migration policy over which they have established issue ownership. Using machine learning techniques, we test this assertion by measuring the differences in salience and framing of migration-related topics over time in the debates of the lower houses of Canada and the United States-the Canadian House of Commons and the United States' House of Representatives from 1994 to 2016. We find that there are substantive differences in the emphasis on and framing of the migration policy between the two ideological blocks. Democrats in the USA and liberals in Canada emphasize subcomponents of the migration debate which they traditionally own, such as welfare and humanitarian aspects. Both conservative blocks do the same by framing their discussion of migration through a focus on security and legalistic aspect of migration. However, due to strong polarization in the USA, the differences in the emphasis on the issues traditionally owned by the two ideological camps are stronger in the USA than in Canada.

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Cross-national measurement of polarization in political discourse: Analyzing floor debate in the U.S. the Japanese legislatures

Cited by 10 publications

References 12 publications

Sentiment and position-taking analysis of parliamentary debates: a systematic literature review

Sentiment and position-taking analysis of parliamentary debates: a systematic literature review

Cross-national analysis of global security discourse using word embeddings

Migration Policy Framing in Political Discourse: Evidence from Canada and the USA

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