Katerina Mandenaki and Prof. Constantinos Mourlas published their new paper ” When text mining meets discourse analysis: “Digging” in the GREEK populism via automatic methods ” in the Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference Europe in Discourse: Agendas of Reform Athens, September 21st – 23rd, 2018, At Athens, Greece. (link http://europeindiscourse.eu/ ). Congratulations!
Abstract:
Does Europe live in a populist zeitgeist? Why would mainstream European parties become more populist in recent years? Some scholars argue that the expansion of right-wing populism in Europe points to the global economic crisis which has left undeniable consequences on a European scale. Others believe that the reducing ideological distinctiveness of parties would cause a change in the content of their communication shifting the competition from policy to image and emotion. This study proposes a different and innovative way of studying and understanding populism as a key constitutive dimension of modern political communication focuses on automatic textual data analysis. Most discursive approaches to populism follow manual content analysis based mainly on rubrics designed to assign grades to texts according to different indicators associated to populism. Having vast amounts of digital text in our disposal we can implement automatic methods and experiment with both dictionary and machine learning techniques in order to determine the benefits of each method to not only detect populism but also to outline its evolution. Furthermore, we are able by altering the focus of research to highlight the physiognomy of populist discursive formations, determine the ideological arena it comes from and examine not only the presence but also the lack of specific features and topics such as gender which has been a major emerging topic in recent literature.
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