IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/wykmj_v1.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

When Groups Fall Apart: Identifying Transnational Polarization with Twitter from the Arab Uprisings

Author

Listed:
  • Kubinec, Robert

    (New York University Abu Dhabi)

  • Owen, John

Abstract

It is very difficult to know how international social linkages affect domestic ideological polarization because we can never observe polarization occurring both with and without international connections. To estimate this missing counterfactual, we employ a new statistical method based on Bayesian item-response theory that permits us to disaggregate polarization after the Arab Uprisings into domestic and transnational components. We collected a dataset of Twitter accounts in Egypt and Tunisia during the critical year of 2013, when the Egyptian military overthrew the Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. We find that the coup increased retweets among Egyptian ideological allies by 50 percent each day following the coup and decreased cross-ideological retweets by 25 percent. Tunisian Twitter communities also showed stronger intra-group retweeting although at lower levels than in Egypt. Counter-intuitively, our model shows that the additional polarization in Tunisia after the coup appears to have dampened further polarization among Islamists in Egypt.

Suggested Citation

  • Kubinec, Robert & Owen, John, 2018. "When Groups Fall Apart: Identifying Transnational Polarization with Twitter from the Arab Uprisings," SocArXiv wykmj_v1, Center for Open Science.
  • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:wykmj_v1
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/wykmj_v1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://osf.io/download/5b62131cbaf092000ffe4296/
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.31219/osf.io/wykmj_v1?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jesse Driscoll & Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld, 2020. "Social media and Russian territorial irredentism: some facts and a conjecture," Post-Soviet Affairs, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(2), pages 101-121, March.
    2. Martin, Andrew D. & Quinn, Kevin M., 2002. "Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953–1999," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 10(2), pages 134-153, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Rorie Spill Solberg & Stefanie A. Lindquist, 2006. "Activism, Ideology, and Federalism: Judicial Behavior in Constitutional Challenges Before the Rehnquist Court, 1986–2000," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 3(2), pages 237-261, July.
    2. Xiaohong Yu & Zhaoyang Sun, 2022. "The company they keep: When and why Chinese judges engage in collegiality," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 19(4), pages 936-1002, December.
    3. Steven Brams & D. Kilgour, 2013. "Kingmakers and leaders in coalition formation," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 41(1), pages 1-18, June.
    4. Arthur Dyevre & Nicolas Lampach, 2021. "Issue attention on international courts: Evidence from the European Court of Justice," The Review of International Organizations, Springer, vol. 16(4), pages 793-815, October.
    5. Keren Weinshall‐Margel, 2011. "Attitudinal and Neo‐Institutional Models of Supreme Court Decision Making: An Empirical and Comparative Perspective from Israel," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 8(3), pages 556-586, September.
    6. Álvaro Bustos & Tonja Jacobi, 2014. "Strategic Judicial Preference Revelation," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 57(1), pages 113-137.
    7. Jule Krüger & Ragnhild Nordås, 2020. "A latent variable approach to measuring wartime sexual violence," Journal of Peace Research, Peace Research Institute Oslo, vol. 57(6), pages 728-739, November.
    8. Nuno Garoupa & Rok Spruk, 2024. "Measuring Political Institutions in the Long Run: A Latent Variable Analysis of Political Regimes, 1810–2018," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 173(3), pages 867-914, July.
    9. Justin Wedeking, 2010. "Supreme Court Litigants and Strategic Framing," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 54(3), pages 617-631, July.
    10. Sarel, Roee & Demirtas, Melanie, 2021. "Delegation in a multi-tier court system: Are remands in the U.S. federal courts driven by moral hazard?," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 68(C).
    11. Benjamin H. Barton & Emily Moran, 2013. "Measuring Diversity on the Supreme Court with Biodiversity Statistics," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 10(1), pages 1-34, March.
    12. Eijffinger, Sylvester & Mahieu, Ronald & Raes, Louis, 2018. "Inferring hawks and doves from voting records," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 107-120.
    13. Richard Holden & Michael Keane & Matthew Lilley, 2021. "Peer effects on the United States Supreme Court," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 12(3), pages 981-1019, July.
    14. Tasos Kalandrakis, 2006. "Roll Call Data and Ideal Points," Wallis Working Papers WP42, University of Rochester - Wallis Institute of Political Economy.
    15. Eijffinger, Sylvester & Mahieu, Ronald & Raes, Louis, 2015. "Hawks and Doves at the FOMC," CEPR Discussion Papers 10442, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    16. Cindy Cheng & Joan Barceló & Allison Spencer Hartnett & Robert Kubinec & Luca Messerschmidt, 2020. "COVID-19 Government Response Event Dataset (CoronaNet v.1.0)," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 4(7), pages 756-768, July.
    17. Kyra Gmoser‐Daskalakis & Tyler A. Scott & Mark Lubell & Francesca P. Vantaggiato, 2023. "An item response approach to sea‐level rise policy preferences in a nascent subsystem," Review of Policy Research, Policy Studies Organization, vol. 40(6), pages 972-1003, November.
    18. Mónica D. Oliveira & Inês Mataloto & Panos Kanavos, 2019. "Multi-criteria decision analysis for health technology assessment: addressing methodological challenges to improve the state of the art," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 20(6), pages 891-918, August.
    19. Crane, Harry, 2017. "A hidden Markov model for latent temporal clustering with application to ideological alignment in the U.S. Supreme Court," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 110(C), pages 19-36.
    20. Martin Andrew D. & Hazelton Morgan L.W., 2012. "What Political Science Can Contribute to the Study of Law," Review of Law & Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 8(2), pages 511-529, October.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:wykmj_v1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: OSF (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://arabixiv.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.