Political Change in a Globalizing World

The Transformation of the national political space in six Western European Countries

Theoretical fundament: The project starts from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationalization leads to the formation of a new structural conflict in Western European countries, opposing those who benefit from this process against those who tend to lose in the course of the events. The structural opposition between globalization 'winners' and 'losers' is expected to constitute potentials for political mobilization within national political contexts, the mobilization of which is expected to give rise to the transformation of the basic structure of the national political space. Six Western European countries are included in the analysis (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland). Present results indicate that in all the countries, under the impact of the mobilization by the populist right, the new cleavage has become embedded into existing two-dimensional national political spaces, that the meaning of the original dimensions has been transformed, and that the configuration of the main parties has become triangular, see box 1.

For further details see: Kriesi, Hanspeter et. al. 2006. “Globalization and the transformation of the national political space: Six European countries compared“ European Journal of Political Research 45(6): 921-956.

Methodological questions: The project seeks to investigate the transformation of the national political space on the basis of new data covering the supply side of electoral campaigns and issue-specific public debates between elections. For each country, we chose a quality paper and a tabloid, see box 2. All the articles related to four electoral contests (one in the 1970s/three in the 1990s) have been selected in both newspapers for the two months prior to election day. For the debates, our sample consist of one quality newspaper per country in the period from 1/1/2004 to 1/31/2006. The articles selected are coded sentence by sentence using the method of 'core sentences'. The basic idea of this method is that the latent as well as manifest content of every written document can be described as a network of relationships of objects. For the purpose of our project we thus code every relationship between 'political objects' (i.e. either between two political actors or between a political actor and a political issue) that appears in the text. Each sentence is reduced to its most basic structure (the so-called 'core sentence') indicating only its subject (political actor) and its object (issue) as well as the direction of the relationship between the two. The direction is quantified using a scale ranging from −1 to +1 (with three intermediary positions). For an example see box 3.

Main technical approach: Since our approach of collecting semantic relationships out of texts is a rather complex task, we aim at a software that supports human coders and can be taught in a stepwise fashion to detect ever more objects and relationships. This means that the selection of articles, the recognition of relevant objects and the coding of metadata should be fully accomplished by the software, while the human coder does the final interpretation of the core sentences. At the same time the software should learn from the already coded core sentences, which entities and relations are relevant and how they have to be annotated.

Technical design: The current application structure is shown in box 4. After downloading a complete period from the database, the articles are converted into an .xml-standard. A selection script allows for a far more elaborate selection than usually possible with popular databases like LexisNexis or Factiva (searching for articles with the full set of regular expressions and boolean operators). Next, the selected articles are preprocessed, i.e. they pass through a tokenizer, tagger and parser. During this process we try to complete the data with recognized entities (provided by object lists) and 'core sentences'. The development of these processes is still under way and their quality is not yet sufficient, especially for the core sentences. Since the pre-coding of core sentences requires grammatical parsing, this step is language dependent. At the moment it is only available as a beta-version for German, but we are developping an English version. The other process stages are tested for French and German, and should work with little effort for most of the Western European languages. The pre-coded articles are then imported in a filemaker interface, which allows for human coding and centralized data storage for up to five coders. Further efforts are aiming at the extension to additional languages and the integration of the preprocesses in an extensible server-based coding application with own GUI and centralized data storage.

Evaluation: The obvious advantages of our coding software are a sophisticated selection procedure and the automatically coding of the metadata, i.e. the date, rubric, length etc., of the articles. These processes work with high accuracy. A preliminary examination of the entity recognition is shown in box 5. To assess the quality of the precodings, we have tested them on one hundred articles of a recently coded campaign, the Swiss 2003 general elections. We pre-processed the articles with lists of parties, candidates and other important politicians, and with keywords for issues. For the relevant core sentences, two thirds of the actors and one fifth of the issues have been correctly identified. The failure to recognise actors is due to pronouns; the failure to identify issues results from an as yet incomplete keyword list, or from the lack of a keyword in the relevant core sentence (in contrast to the entire article). To solve the latter problem, a simple solution would be to provide the human coder with a list of precoded issues concerning the entire article.Further testing with improved keyord lists are needed. Unfortunately, the parsing of core sentences is still in its infancy. We are not satisfied with the grammtical rules and have not yet developed or found useful lists for verbs to identify the direction of a position. It is therefore too early to present results for the preprocessing of core sentences.

Political scienceHanspeter KriesiMarc Helbling, Bruno Wüest, Dominic HoeglingerContact: kriesi@ipz.uzh.ch

Computional linguisticsMichael Hess, Alexandra Bünzli, Simon Clematide

Box 1: Political space in Britain

Box 3: Example of coding method

Election campaign Britain 2001, The Times, April 18

“In his most vitriolic speech yet against the Government's plan, Mr Livingstone, the Mayor of London, encouraged Londoners yesterday to challenge every general election candidate on the doorstep about the Public-Private Partnership (PPP).”

Sentence Subject Quality Objectactor-actor Ken Livingstone (Labour) -1 Government (Labour)actor-issue Ken Livingstone (Labour) -1 PPP (economic liberalism)

Box 2: Newspaper sources

paper database

The Times* LexisNexisThe Sun LexisNexisLe Monde* CD-ROM

(publisher)Le Parisien FactivaSüddeutsche FactivaZeitung*Bild** –NRC Handelsblad* LexisNexisAlgemeen Dagblad LexisNexisDie Presse FactivaKronenzeitung** –Neue Zürcher Zeitung CD-ROM

(publisher)Blick Swiss Media

Service (SMD)

* both debates and election campaigns** access too expensive

Box 5: Evaluation

Campaign: Swiss general election 2003.Papers: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Blick

Selection (2 month period)

Total number of articles: 12'436Selected articles: 1596False positives in selection: 629*

Coding (100 articles)

manually matchcoded quality**

actors 512 64.5%issues 246 19.5%total 785 49.9%

* This articles were mainly irrelevant because they deal with local politics or are press commentaries** Ratio correct precoded entities/manually coded entites

Box 4: Software pipeline