Scientists from Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) have designed a new methodology to analyze political polarization through the Facebook posts of European parties. After studying the ideology of the 27 Member States of the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom, they have created a website to display the results openly, allowing for comparisons between countries in different time periods.
“Using the published posts, one can analyze which side of the political spectrum each European country leans towards, for example, to determine if they are more left-leaning or right-leaning. It also allows one to check how politically divided or polarized each nation is,” explains one of the authors of this work, Francisco Caravaca, a researcher in the Telematics Engineering department at UC3M and co-author of the study.
The research collects data from three years, from 2019 to 2021, gathering information from the Facebook pages of 234 political parties. The authors took advantage of the 2019 European Parliament elections and 18 other electoral processes to create and validate their models.
“Our methodology benefits from being a low-cost execution process that measures ideology and polarization,” adds another researcher, Ángel Cuevas, a professor in the same department at UC3M. By using data from a social network, it is possible to observe changes in political trends in each of the countries analyzed, allowing for a monthly evolution of these changes.
This innovative tool opens new possibilities for understanding the political dynamics of Europe and how it evolves over time, providing a valuable resource not only for researchers but also for journalists, political analysts, and the general public interested in politics.
Caravaca, F., et al. (2022). Estimating ideology and polarization in European countries using Facebook data. EPJ Data Science (2022). Rights: Creative Commons. Source: Sinc Agency.
Referrer: MiMub in Spanish
