2020 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
A New Approach to Measuring Political and Social Polarisation in Developed Nations
| Project/Area Number |
19K23181
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| Research Institution | Waseda University |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Project Period (FY) |
2019-08-30 – 2022-03-31
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| Keywords | polarization / social polarization / cross-national / social networks / network analysis / social media / comparative politics / affective polarization |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
This research project has created and tested an empirical method for measuring social polarisation - i.e., polarisation among citizens in line with their political identity, as distinct from polarisation among political parties - across different countries by using large-scale data gathered from Twitter. Follower network data was gathered for political parties, politicians and citizens in four target countries, namely Japan, Italy, Belgium and Ireland - a set of advanced liberal democracies which all have high social media usage and multi-party democratic systems, but a wide range of demographics, social cleavages, and levels of political populism.
This data was analysed using network graph analysis techniques, with distances between the citizens' accounts being based on the Jaccard Distance between their follower networks. The network models generated from this approach have allowed the identification of clusters of parties whose users are more similar in social, non-political terms, and measurement of the degree of polarisation between those clusters. Moreover, it enables direct cross-national comparison of how polarised the social media environment in each country is.
Results of this analysis were presented at the APSA 2020 General Meeting in September 2020. Some insights from the research were included in the "Populism in Japan" chapter of The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Politics, published in early 2021, and a full chapter based on the research has been accepted for the book "Values in European and Japanese Politics", to be published in late 2021.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.
Reason
Data collection and analysis for the initial phase (covering Japan, Italy, Belgium and Ireland) went smoothly and the research was well-received by discussants at the APSA General Meeting in September 2020. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has made collaboration with colleagues on the final stage of the project (which will include some extra nations) more difficult and time-consuming than expected. The project is now expected to complete in 2021.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
The next and final stage of the project will expand the scope of the research to cover a number of additional nations in East Asia and Europe. In order to do this, research assistants or collaborators familiar with the political and social systems of these nations have been contacted, and data collection and analysis (repeating the pattern used for the other countries so far) will be carried out.
In addition, some further robustness checks will be carried out on the data using different network modelling approaches. Finally, at least one journal paper based on this project will be submitted to a major international journal. There is also a possibility of submitting additional papers focusing on valuable findings from the individual nations included in the study.
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| Causes of Carryover |
Due to the restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, recruiting and working with research assistants on the second group of target countries for the research was slowed down significantly. The remaining amount which has been carried over will be used to complete this work and to cover any additional costs involved in publishing the results of the research project.
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