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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Political Science Methodologies
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2024.1385678
This article is part of the Research Topic Methods in political science – Innovation & Developments View all 3 articles

Augmenting surveys with social media discourse on the workings of democracy from a cross-national perspective

Provisionally accepted
Maud Reveilhac Maud Reveilhac 1*Davide Morselli Davide Morselli 2
  • 1 University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland
  • 2 Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This paper introduces an unsupervised framework that illustrates how insights gathered from opinion surveys regarding the functionality of democracy can be connected to social media messages of politicians on an international scale. By concentrating on the influence of social media messages from elected officials, the study adopts a "top-down" theoretical approach that links citizens' attitudes towards democracy with the viewpoints about democracy expressed by politicians within social media discourses. Using a word embedding classification strategy, democracy-related themes are extracted from politicians' messages. The research is conducted across 11 European countries,

    Keywords: Democracy, Public Opinion, Social Media, Politicians, Natural Language Processing

    Received: 13 Feb 2024; Accepted: 30 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Reveilhac and Morselli. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Maud Reveilhac, University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland

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