Regensburg 2022 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 14: Computational Social Science
SOE 14.1: Talk
Wednesday, September 7, 2022, 15:00–15:30, H11
Issue bundles: Understanding ideological patterns of polarization in political spaces. — •Eckehard Olbrich1 and Sven Banisch2 — 1Max Planck Institut for Matematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, Germany — 2Institute of Technology Futures, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Many scholars of politics discuss the rise of the new populism in Western Europe and the US with respect to a new political cleavage related to globalization.
In this contribution we empirically address this reconfiguration of the political space by comparing political spaces for Germany built using topic modeling with the spaces based on the content analysis of the Manifesto project and the corresponding categories of political goals.
We find that both spaces have a similar structure and that the right-wing populist AfD appears on a new dimension. In order to characterize this new dimension we employ a novel technique to identify clusters of political goals, issue bundles, by maximizing the coherence of inter-issue consistency networks (IICN). These issue bundles allow to analyze the evolution of the correlations between the political positions on different issues over several elections. We find that the new dimension introduced by the AfD can be related to the split off of a new "culturally right" issue bundle from the previously existing center-right bundle.
E. Olbrich, and S. Banisch, The rise of populism and the reconfiguration of the German political space, Frontiers in Big Data 4, 731349 (2021).