2. Outline
• Social Media and Political Research
• Breakdown Literature
• Theory on Breakdown
• Case Examples
• Using Social Media to Understand Radicalization and Support for Autocrats
3. Social Media and Political Events
• Why is it important to study the relationship between online content and political
phenomena?
• We can observe millions of expressions a day
• Social media transcends geographic barriers
• Online social capital (Gleason 2013)
• Arab Spring
• Occupy Wall Street (global movement)
4. Understanding Anti-Americanism (Jamal et al.
2015)
• Analysis of political and social sentiment of tweets in Arabic
• Supervised learning: they apply a test set to train the machine to learn distinct patterns
(difference between social and political subjectivity)
• Their goal is to understand whether anti-American sentiment is directed toward the
political policy of the US or a result cultural differences (e.g. Huntington’s thesis)
• Findings:
• Negative tweets toward outside powers are more salient in general (not only towards
United States)
• Although the United States, because of its long-term involvement in Middle-East affairs,
receives a significantly larger proportion of negative sentiment
• Political context is more salient than the social context
6. Learning about Chinese Censorship (King
et al. 2013)
• King et al. analyzed Chinese social media activity and government censorship
• They used an algorithm to detect “bursts” in activity and linked them with real
events
• King et al. identified 85 topics and five social content areas:
• 1) Collective action potential – most relevant
• 2) Criticism of censors – constant censorship
• 3) Pornography- constant censorship
• 4) Government Policies- no censorship
• 5) Other
• What does their result tell us?
• “Chinese people are individually free but collectively in chains” (p. 28)
7. Democratic Breakdown
• Three primary modes of breakdown:
• 1) Exogenous – i.e. military coup
• 2) Endogenous – i.e. executive takeover
• 3) “Democide” - electing authoritarian leaders/parties
• Important to consider the dynamic between social classes (e.g. Rueschemeyer et
al 1992):
• Elites are generally anti-democratic.
• The working class are generally democratic
• The middle class are difficult to predict
• The role of international powers may influence regime type (see also Boix 2011)
8. Economy, Legitimacy, and Breakdown
• High inequality and an economic crisis leads to a greater likelihood of a democratic
breakdown (Lipset 1959, to start with)
• Low growth, development, and a declining economy reduce the legitimacy of the regime
(and also its capacity to be effective).
• Class dynamic changes depending on the economic environment (Acemoglu & Robinson 2005;
Boix 2003)
Legitimacy Effectiveness
Stable
Regime
9. Institutional Weakness and Elite
Disunity
• A weak legislative branch increases the probability of a regime takeover (Sing
2010).
• Economic crises cause elite instability (Haggard & Kaufman 2012)
• The combination of low growth, weak institutions, and high inequality increase
intra-elite conflict Similar to causes of civil war (Collier & Hoeffler 2000, Fearon
& Laitin 2003).
10. Culture and Society (Inglehart and Welzel 2005)
• Post-industrial cultures are supportive and ready for democracy
• They have the desire to be autonomous
• There is greater interpersonal trust
• However, under economic decline, societies can slip back
• Think of the Weimar Republic:
• Post-World War I Germany was considered a pluralist democratic.
• They suffered severely from the Great Depression
• NAZI support went from approx. 2% to over 30%, leading to a democide.
11. Economic Decline and Coups
• Note: Binary dependent variable is coup event
• Exogenous, endogenous, and leaders stepping down
• Decline in GDP Per Cap, GDP Growth, and executive constraint
increases the likelihood of a coup and regime turnover.
• Data consists of events between 1960 and 2013 in 180 countries.
12. Contentious Politics (Tilly)
• Contention is constantly present
• There are multiple polities within a regime and thus many contenders (Tilly 1973)
• The main polity is the one that monopolizes coercive force
• Contenders rarely manifest into challengers of the regime (this is theorized to
occur when there is an opportunity to mobilize – but that is a separate story).
Nonetheless, it is relevant, because autocrats can capitalize support of unhappy
constituents/contenders.
13. Peru and Chile
• Peru under Fujimori: an example of an endogenous takeover.
• In the late 1980’s, Peru was facing an economic crisis. Specifically, they were under a
recession and had hyperinflation. Moreover, they had political gridlock.
• Fujimori, claiming that he will fix the political and economic problem, disbanded
congress and the judiciary in 1992.
• Similarly, Pinochet’s exogenous takeover in 1973 of President Allende’s
government was possible because of Chile’s economic crisis and the disunity
among the elite (Linz 1973).
14. Theory of Regime Takeover
Takeover
Opportunity
Legislative
Weakness or
Ineffectiveness
Economic
Collapse
Elite Disunity
Dissatisfied
Masses
• Leaders or groups who desire to grab total power need to be able to justify their takeover to
the public. Therefore, they will wait for the moment in which the masses are unhappy with their
government or political system.
• A regime is most vulnerable when the economy is not performing, the legislature is
ineffective or has low control (i.e. missing checks and balances), and the elites are not
working together to solve the economic and political problems. This is when we can
expect highest dissatisfaction and the radicalization of society.
15. How can we anticipate a possible
breakdown?
• We have measures for economic performance and outsiders can observe
legislative effectiveness.
• However, the challenge is to observe public sentiment and find radicalization in
real-time
• This is possible (with limitations) through analyses of social media, such as Facebook
posts, tweets and other popular means of communicating online.
16. Sentiment Analysis: #tweet- ‘Suppose you were an
idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress, but I repeat
myself…Mark Twain’
4612 4692
3232
5791
3202
3753
1861
3066
1736
1506
1043
1587
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
Tories SNP Labour U.S. Congress
Neutral Positive Negative
17. Supervised Learning and Natural
Language Processing
• In order to increase accuracy it is important to train the machine using a set of
manually classified text, where the machine will be able to extract features and
recognize patterns.
Generic example:
•These politicians are corrupt, they only serve their own interest!
•Vote them out! They are good for nothing scoundrels.Negative
•Vote for change! Support this candidate!
•Let’s join and fight for this group.Positive
•Congress passed Bill # 12385.
•We are hosting an event this weekend.Neutral
18. • Using the training data we can extract features and stop words (words that have
no polarity).
• More importantly, we can train the machine to discriminate between ideology
and economic grievance (and classify using Support Vector Machine or other
algorithms)
• Thus, through machine learning we can identify underlying reasons people support
anti-democratic leaders and parties (has to be theory driven)
• Challenge is to detect political sarcasm and train to classify sentiment of multiple
languages: e.g. Turkish, Russian, German, Chinese, etc.
• Sarcasm example: ‘Vote for the #Tories, because they will borrow more money and
increase our debt’ So, maybe we have to identify positive sentiment and negative
situations in a sentence or tweet (see Riloff, E., Qadir, A., Surve, P., De Silva, L., Gilbert,
N., & Huang, R. (2013). Sarcasm as Contrast between a Positive Sentiment and
Negative Situation. In EMNLP (pp. 704-714)).
• There is a Python package called Polyglot that attempts to manage multiple languages
(http://polyglot.readthedocs.org/en/latest/)
19. Case at Hand: ISIS (with Dr. Ciftci and Dr. Hsu)
• ISIS is a radical organization that has carved out territory in the Middle-East,
establishing an authoritarian regime.
• They are a “big hit” on social media
• There are followers and organizations on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media who
publicly declare their support for ISIS
• Some travel to Syria and Iraq to directly support ISIS
• We have been streaming tweets mentioning relevant Turkish hashtags related to ISIS
for two months (still collecting).
• Next step is to train a classifier and extract information: We want to know why
people are supporting ISIS.
• Is it because of ideology or anti-Western sentiment?
• Are supporters mainly from the low income class? – in other words, do they have economic
grievances?
