2021 Fiscal Year Annual Research 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 | polarisation / contemporary politics / comparative politics / social media / network analysis / political polarisation / affective polarisation |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
The main objective of this project was to develop and test a methodology for using network analysis of social media data to empirically measure different forms of polarisation - specifically, political and non-political polarisation. This method was tested across four countries - Japan, Italy, Belgium, and Ireland - using a large random sample of Twitter users' social graphs, with Jaccard distances between users' most-followed accounts used to calculate polarisation, and manual labelling of key accounts in the network (into categories such as 'media', 'academic', 'celebrity' and so on) used to identify the predominant forms of polarisation in each country.
This methodology proved very effective, not only identifying key features of social polarisation within each nation studied, but also providing an empirical basis for international comparisons of the extent of online polarisation. Among the four countries studied, Japan and Ireland were shown to have a low level of non-political polarisation on social media, while Belgium and Italy had much higher levels of polarisation. Future research using this methodology will encompass a wider range of target nations.
The research from this project was presented at two international conferences: the Values in European and Japanese Politics conference in Brussels, Belgium (2019), and the APSA General Meeting 2020 (held online). A detailed chapter based on this methodology was published in the Palgrave MacMillan book 'Value Politics in Japan and Europe' in December 2021.
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Research Products
(1 results)
