https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-024-00480-3
Research
Quantifying polarization in online political discourse
1
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
2
University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain
Received:
30
September
2023
Accepted:
20
May
2024
Published online:
5
June
2024
In an era of increasing political polarization, its analysis becomes crucial for the understanding of democratic dynamics. This paper presents a comprehensive research on measuring political polarization on X (Twitter) during election cycles in Spain, from 2011 to 2019. A wide comparative analysis is performed on algorithms used to identify and measure polarization or controversy on microblogging platforms. This analysis is specifically tailored towards publications made by official political party accounts during pre-campaign, campaign, election day, and the week post-election. Guided by the findings of this comparative evaluation, we propose a novel algorithm better suited to capture polarization in the context of political events, which is validated with real data. As a consequence, our research contributes a significant advancement in the field of political science, social network analysis, and overall computational social science, by providing a realistic method to capture polarization from online political discourse.
Key words: Polarization / Political discourse / Information theory
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-024-00480-3.
© The Author(s) 2024
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