Sentiment Political Compass: a Data-Driven Analysis of Online Newspapers Regarding Political Orientation
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Sentiment Political Compass: A Data-driven Analysis of Online Newspapers regarding Political Orientation Fabian Falck 1 Julian Marstaller 2 Niklas Stoehr 3 Soren¨ Maucher 2 Jeana Ren 2 Andreas Thalhammer 4 Achim Rettinger 4 Rudi Studer 4 Abstract role, it may strongly influence public beliefs and act as an In most cases, voters only have a vague and sub- opinion maker, as evidenced through many historic election jective perception of a newspaper’s proximity to campaigns. In most cases, voters only have a vague and sub- political parties. If voters are uninformed about jective perception of a newspapers proximity to the political the political attitude of media reporting, they parties. If voters are uninformed about the political pur- may be manipulated in their democratic opinion- pose of media reporting, they may be manipulated in their forming. One answer to biased news and false in- democratic opinion-forming (Mutz, 1989). In particular, in formation is transparancy and quantifiablity. For the context of the reinvigoration of right wing movements this reason, we introduce the Sentiment Politi- in recent years, the position of online newspapers towards cal Compass, a data-driven framework to ana- false information has acquired a new significance (Bessi lyze newspapers with respect to their political et al., 2015). In many countries, the political landscape conviction. Newspapers are embedded in a two- has undergone a fundamental change. The traditional ter- dimensional space (left vs. right, libertarian vs. minology of left- or right-wing which is an integral part autocratic) resembling a compass, which serves of common parlance is becoming more difficult to assess as a tool for analysing relative political proxim- (Dalton and McAllister, 2015). Therefore, qualitative efforts ity. We provide technical details of the system, for classifying political conviction need to be replaced by including the framework to crawl newspaper arti- more quantitative models. How can we measure the political cles, locate and extract entities and perform entity convictions of newspapers and their proximity to political sentiment analysis. We demonstrate the analytical parties using big data? power and informative value of our approach by analyzing over 180,000 newspaper articles with 1.2. The Sentiment Political Compass over 740,000 sentiments surrounding the federal One answer to biased media reporting and false information elections 2017 in Germany. Since our model can is transparancy and quantifiablity. This paper analyses news- be reproduced entirely open-source, it may be papers with respect to political opinion forming by making applied to classify the political landscape in any the following three contributions: country in the world. (a) We present the Sentiment Political Compass (SPC), a data-driven framework that classifies the attitude of newspa- pers towards political parties. The approach is completely 1. Introduction transparent since it is based on entity sentiment analysis of 1.1. Political Bias of Online Newspapers thousands of newspaper articles. The Sentiment Political Compass discloses the temporal dimension of connections News media is known as the fourth power in the demo- between political events and societal shifts. These connec- cratic process taking the position of a mediator between tions are visualized in a two-dimensional space resembling politics and society (Beck, 2012). Assuming this powerful a compass, which serves as a tool for media monitoring. (b) We present all technical details of the system including 1Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom 2Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, the framework to crawl newspaper articles, locating and Germany 3Department of Computer Science, University of Ox- extracting entities and performing entity sentiment analysis. ford, Oxford, United Kingdom 4Institute of Applied Informatics We provide two full-fledge implementations of the entire and Formal Description Methods, Karlsruhe Institute of Tech- working pipeline, one version using commercial services nology, Karlsruhe, Germany. Correspondence to: Fabian Falck and another being entirely open-source. For this reason, <[email protected]>. the Sentiment Political Compass may be reproduced and Manuscript for IPP 2018. Copyright 2018 by the authors. applied to analyze the relation between the media landscape Sentiment Political Compass: Data-driven analysis of political orientation and politics in any country in the world. 2. Related Work (c) In this paper, we demonstrate the analytical power and informative value of our approach, by analyzing the politi- 2.1. Classification of Political Conviction cal media sentiment in Germany during the election year of In this section, we present models and fundamental research the German federal parliament and the subsequent coalition in political science that form the basis of the Sentiment Polit- negotiations in 2017/2018. Our final dataset contains over ical Compass. In the French revolutionary era, the terms left- 180,000 newspaper articles with around 740,000 matched wing politics and right-wing politics first originated (Lester, entity sentiments. Our analysis yields new insights about the 1994). Early attempts to quantify political conviction date effects of right-wing media coverage on the overall media back to 1950 and 1956 respectively, when Leonard W. Fer- landscape and the political parties. guson and Hans Eysenck both designed models for a factor The general working pipeline of the Sentiment Political analysis of political values. In 1969, David Nolan created a Compass, as illustrated in figure1, involves three high-level chart diagram contrasting four major political convictions, steps: (1) Article crawling: extraction of newspaper articles conservative and liberal, authoritarian and libertarian in a (2) Entity extraction and sentiment analysis: identification 2-dimensional space (Nolan, 1971). According to the Nolan of political entities in newspaper articles and analysis of Chart, a differentiating criterion is a partys view towards their contextual sentiment (3) Sentiment Political Compass: economic and personal freedom. Numerous alterations of computation of the political position of the newspapers and the Nolan Chart exist, introduced by Pournelle, Meltzer and subsequent analysis. Even though we present a generic Christie, Bryson and McDill, and also more dimensional variants like the Vosem Chart. Fritz first developed a model that introduces political parties into the Nolan Chart: The worlds smallest political quiz (Fritz, 1987) assigns a position Step 1: Article crawling Step 2: Entity Step 3: Sentiment Political in the plot according to a test takers answers to 10 questions Sentiment Analysis Compass and Analysis which are divided into two kinds: economic and personal. Angela Merkel, negative In 2003, Greenberg and Jonas (Greenberg J, 2003) con- Gerhard Schröder Article Newspaper structively discussed “psychological motives and political articles criticized Merkel for her handling of the autocratic orientation” and laid the foundation of the “political com- diesel scandal. Newspaper 1 … left right pass”, a two-axis model introduced by the anonymous organ- Merkel critics appreciate Merkel’s isation politicalcompass.org (politicalcompass.org, 2001). Article decisions on the new cabinet. liberal The “political compass” constitutes a restructured version Article of the Nolan Chart by shifting back its interpretation to the Political party A, B, C Newspaper 2 Angela Merkel, positive Newspaper 1, 2, 3 standard left-right axis and a vertical axis representing ide- Newspaper 3 ological rigidity. Even though the “political compass” still tries to capture the political landscape in a two-dimensional space only, it combines long-established terminology with Figure 1. Schematic illustration of the high-level steps to perform a more stretched classification and allows for quantitative the entity sentiment analysis and its subsequent analysis, conclud- analysis. In order to translate political views into the space, ing in the Sentiment Political Compass. the model builds upon Fritz’s rule-based quiz by scoring the answers to 61 questions on the scale “strongly agree”, “agree”, “disagree”, “strongly disagree”. In a similar fashion, the German Federal Agency for Civic Education offers a framework that is applicable to any possible country and question-answer-website to let voters compare their political time frame, we make use of a particular dataset throughout conviction to specific topics with those of political parties the paper. For ease of explanation and consistency, we (BPB, 2002). The so-called “Wahl-o-Mat” uses a scoring build the technical framework upon a dataset of newspaper framework that resembles “The world’s smallest political articles published during the election year of 2017 and 2018 quiz”. Politicalcompass.org provides a finalized model of in Germany. the German party landscape in the election year 2017. We First, we introduce related work and shed light on the tech- would like to highlight that we build on top of this existing nical details of the framework. This involves a description model, enriching it with the political orientation of news- of how to crawl the newspaper articles, retrieve entities and paper articles towards political parties based on sentiment perform entity sentiment analysis. These steps form the ba- information. sis of our data pipeline. We showcase the analytical power of our approach and present