Group Appeals Across Time and Space: An Automated Measure of Parties’ Appeals to Social Groups (With Lena Maria Huber and Will Horne)
Speaker: (opens in a new window)Alona Dolinsky (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Wednesday, April 10, 14:00–14:45 (Irish time)
Please register (opens in a new window)here to receive the link and password to the online meeting and information on the room at UCD.
Abstract: A growing literature in political science studies parties’ group-based appeals, which have been found to be prevalent in parties’ election materials. However, as past large-scale data collection efforts focused primarily on the policy content of manifestos rather than on appeals to social groups per se, still little data exist to support empirical analyses. This data scarcity is in part the result of the significant effort required in collecting such data on a large scale. As questions of group appeals are important for our understanding of political representation, party behavior, and the party-voter linkage, we join the recent efforts to expand available data on group appeals. Turning to computational text analysis methods, this paper outlines an automated approach to the extraction of group appeals from political texts. This includes the construction of a dictionary as a base for a new transformer model for social group detection, as well as a more complex BERT-NLI model to identify the stance (positive, negative or neutral) parties take towards the social group. As a test case, we analyze election manifestos of major parties in the UK and Ireland since the 1970s, showing that an automated approach is valuable in extracting data on group appeals, revealing important trends in party behavior with implications for party competition, voter behavior and political representation.
About the speaker: (opens in a new window)Alona Dolinsky is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Communication Science. Under a Horizon Europe Grant, she is working on the GAPREP project that investigates the relationship between group appeals and political representation. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Dublin.
Her research interests include comparative party politics, group appeals, political representation, intra-party candidate selection, and text-as-data, motivated by questions of the representative relationship between political parties and voters as a core aspect of modern democracies.