Toeing the Party Line: Election Manifestos as a Key to Understand Political Discourse on Twitter

Maximilian Maurer, Tanise Ceron, Sebastian Padó, Gabriella Lapesa


Abstract
Political discourse on Twitter is a moving target: politicians continuously make statements about their positions. It is therefore crucial to track their discourse on social media to understand their ideological positions and goals. However, Twitter data is also challenging to work with since it is ambiguous and often dependent on social context, and consequently, recent work on political positioning has tended to focus strongly on manifestos (parties’ electoral programs) rather than social media.In this paper, we extend recently proposed methods to predict pairwise positional similarities between parties from the manifesto case to the Twitter case, using hashtags as a signal to fine-tune text representations, without the need for manual annotation. We verify the efficacy of fine-tuning and conduct a series of experiments that assess the robustness of our method for low-resource scenarios. We find that our method yields stable positionings reflective of manifesto positionings, both in scenarios with all tweets of candidates across years available and when only smaller subsets from shorter time periods are available. This indicates that it is possible to reliably analyze the relative positioning of actors without the need for manual annotation, even in the noisier context of social media.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.354
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6115–6130
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.354
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.354
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maximilian Maurer, Tanise Ceron, Sebastian Padó, and Gabriella Lapesa. 2024. Toeing the Party Line: Election Manifestos as a Key to Understand Political Discourse on Twitter. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 6115–6130, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Toeing the Party Line: Election Manifestos as a Key to Understand Political Discourse on Twitter (Maurer et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.354.pdf