Affective Polarization across European Parliaments
This addresses the issue of political hostility for researchers and policymakers, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study tackled the problem of measuring affective polarization in European parliaments by analyzing parliamentary speeches using natural language processing, finding consistent affective polarization across all six countries and identifying reciprocity as a contributing mechanism.
Affective polarization, characterized by increased negativity and hostility towards opposing groups, has become a prominent feature of political discourse worldwide. Our study examines the presence of this type of polarization in a selection of European parliaments in a fully automated manner. Utilizing a comprehensive corpus of parliamentary speeches from the parliaments of six European countries, we employ natural language processing techniques to estimate parliamentarian sentiment. By comparing the levels of negativity conveyed in references to individuals from opposing groups versus one's own, we discover patterns of affectively polarized interactions. The findings demonstrate the existence of consistent affective polarization across all six European parliaments. Although activity correlates with negativity, there is no observed difference in affective polarization between less active and more active members of parliament. Finally, we show that reciprocity is a contributing mechanism in affective polarization between parliamentarians across all six parliaments.