RT Journal Article
T1 Estimating ideology and polarization in European countries using Facebook data
A1 Caravaca Crespo, Francisco
A1 González Cabañas, José
A1 Cuevas Rumín, Ángel
A1 Cuevas Rumín, Rubén
AB Researchers have studied political ideology and polarization in many different contexts since their effects are usually closely related to aspects and actions of individuals and societies. Hence, being able to estimate and measure the changes in political ideology and polarization is crucial for researchers, stakeholders, and the general public. In this paper, we model the ideology and polarization of 28 countries (the 27 EU member states plus the UK) using Facebook public posts from political parties’ Facebook pages. We collected a three-year dataset from 2019 to 2021 with information from 234 political parties’ Facebook pages and took advantage of the EU parliament elections of May 2019 to create our models. Our methodology works across 28 countries and benefits from being a low-cost running process that measures ideology and polarization at a high-resolution time scale. The results show our models are pretty accurate when validating them against 19 individual countries’ elections as ground truth. Moreover, to make our results available to the research community, stakeholders, and individuals interested in politics, the last contribution of our paper is a website including detailed information about the political parties in our dataset. It also includes the temporal evolution of our ideology and polarization estimations. Therefore, our work delivers a novel tool that uses Facebook public data to create country metrics useful for different purposes. To the best of our knowledge, there is no prior work in the literature offering a solution that measures the ideology and polarization of all EU + UK countries.
PB Springer
SN 2193-1127
YR 2022
FD 2022-11-22
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/36592
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/36592
LA eng
NO This research received funding from the Madrid Government (Comunidad de Madrid-Spain) under the Multiannual Agreement with UC3M ("Fostering Young Doctors Research", UE-MEASURE-CM-UC3M) the agreement between the Community of Madrid and the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. The Community of Madrid and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid for the funding of research projects on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 disease, project name "Multi-source and multi-method prediction to support COVID-19 policy decision making", which was supported with REACT-EU funds from the European regional development fund "a way of making Europe". The European Union's Horizon 2020 programme under TESTABLE project (Grant 101019206). The Agencia the Estatal de Investigación (AEI) under the ENTRUDIT project (Grant TED2021-130118B-I00). The Fundación BBVA under the project AERIS.
DS e-Archivo
RD 1 sept. 2024