EPSA Konferenz 2024 | Panel 2013: Text Analysis and NLP und Panel 1026: Social Change, Voting and Gender von Martin Elff

Vom 04. bis 06. Juli 2024 fand die Konferenz der European Political Science Association (EPSA) in Köln statt. Martin Elff vom Lehrstuhl für Politische Soziologie an der Zeppelin Universität präsentierte dort im Rahmen des Panels "Text Analysis and NLP" seine Forschung zum Thema "Non-ignorable nonlinearity and the scaling of political texts". Als Vorsitzender des Panels moderierte er zudem die Diskussionen zu weiteren spannenden Beiträgen im Bereich der Textanalyse und Natural Language Processing.

Darüber hinaus stellte Martin Elff im Panel "Social Change, Voting and Gender" seine Forschung zum Thema "Gendered Cleavage Voting? The Role of Class and Religion for Voting for Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, the Greens and right-wing populists in a long-term perspective" vor. Hierbei untersuchte er die Rolle von Klasse und Religion bei der Wahlentscheidung für Christdemokraten, Sozialdemokraten, die Grünen und rechtspopulistische Parteien aus einer langfristigen Perspektive.

Titel: Non-ignorable nonlinearity and the scaling of political texts

Abstract

Correspondence analysis is often used to determine the number of relevant dimensions when political positions are reconstructed from political texts. However, if the selective emphasis model of political text is correct and if counts of words, sentences, or quasi-sentences form the basis of reconstructing political texts, correspondence analysis and similar methods lead to erroneous conclusion about the dimensionality of political positions (Lowe 2023). We show that this is a consequence of the inevitable non-linearity of the transformation of positions and distances between positions into selective emphases. We further present a technique that is unaffected by this problem and that can easily applied to exploratory analyses of political texts. This technique is implemented in R and applied to simulated data.

Titel: Gendered Cleavage Voting? The Role of Class and Religion for Voting for Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, the Greens and right-wing populists in a long-term perspective

Abstract

In this paper we examine whether and how tradional cleavages based on class and religion produced gendered voting patterns both with regard to the „old“ cleavage parties, Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, and so-called „new“ politics parties, i.e. the Greens and the right-wing populist/radical party in Germany. We analyze the change in the gender gap in voting decisions in favor of the traditional people‘s parties SPD and CDU/CSU from 1949 up to 2021 and since the early 1980s for the Green party and applying a much shorter time frame for the AfD, which competed at the federal election of 2013 for the first time. In this paper we argue, that it might be premature to dismiss class and religion as a predictor of gendered voting behaviour for „new“ politics parties. Between 1949 and 2021, the gender composition of social classes and the frequency of churchgoing changed significantly. The shrinking working class becomes more and more male over time, while the rapidly growing class of simple routine professions becomes more and more female. Compared to men, a delayed secularization trend can be observed among women. After taking class and frequency of church attendance into account, however, there are major differences in the voting behavior of men and women only until the early 1970s. The influence of gender on voting behavior in favor of the mainstream parties is therefore primarily indirect and is mediated by class and churchgoing frequency. We also can show that class and religion, i.e. the „old“ cleavages significantly contribute to explaining gender differences in voting for „new“ politics parties.