Shifting in Party Positions: Analysis of Facebook Content of the Czech SPD

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Authors

VODA Petr

Year of publication 2017
Type Appeared in Conference without Proceedings
Citation
Description The proposed paper deals with positions of the far right party SPD in dimensions of anti-immigration, minority policy and populism and with evolution of these positions during last three years. Positions are estimated by automatic text analysis, more precisely by wordfish. This method was developed by Slapin and Proksh in 2008. Method works as a scaling technique based on statistical model of word counts. The result of the model is a single dimension of word frequencies. Method has been tested on speeches in Parliament of the EU on reliability in different languages with satisfactory results. However, it has not been used to analyze texts in czech language. This could be one of contributions of the paper. As source of text, the facebook statements written by party chairman Tomio Okamura are used. To obtain all facebook content over last years, webscraping library for software R will be used. For analyzing each dimension, only statements containing specific keywords are used. The selected texts will be dived to groups on monthly bases to secure enough content for estimation of positions. Prior to analysis, words in texts will be turned to lemmas using morpodita python library. Finally, the paper will discuss differences between results obtained by wordfish and results of different analyses (expert surveys, content analysis of manifesto), if they will be avialable before conference since these analysis are conducted during elections by other institutions. As the result, paper helps us to understand the traces of extremist rhetoric and find out in what context the radicalism is increasing.
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