Political Ideology and Polarization: A Multi-dimensional Approach

Barea Sinno, Bernardo Oviedo, Katherine Atwell, Malihe Alikhani, Junyi Jessy Li


Abstract
Analyzing ideology and polarization is of critical importance in advancing our grasp of modern politics. Recent research has made great strides towards understanding the ideological bias (i.e., stance) of news media along the left-right spectrum. In this work, we instead take a novel and more nuanced approach for the study of ideology based on its left or right positions on the issue being discussed. Aligned with the theoretical accounts in political science, we treat ideology as a multi-dimensional construct, and introduce the first diachronic dataset of news articles whose ideological positions are annotated by trained political scientists and linguists at the paragraph level. We showcase that, by controlling for the author’s stance, our method allows for the quantitative and temporal measurement and analysis of polarization as a multidimensional ideological distance. We further present baseline models for ideology prediction, outlining a challenging task distinct from stance detection.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-main.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
231–243
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.17
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.17
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Barea Sinno, Bernardo Oviedo, Katherine Atwell, Malihe Alikhani, and Junyi Jessy Li. 2022. Political Ideology and Polarization: A Multi-dimensional Approach. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 231–243, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Political Ideology and Polarization: A Multi-dimensional Approach (Sinno et al., NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.17.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.17.mp4
Code
 bernovie/political-polarization