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Opinion dynamics in political spaces

Eckehard Olbrich (Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences) will present at the médialab research seminar.

Rendez-vous, Séminaire de recherche

Salle C002, 1 place St-Thomas d'Aquin, 75007 Paris

Eckehard Olbrich (Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences) will present his work about the measurement of the rise of new populist movements and parties during a médialab research seminar.

Abstract

"Many scholars of politics discuss the rise of new populist movements and parties as caused by a new political cleavage related to globalization which is replacing the older "class based" cleavage as the dominant dimension of political conflict. In this talk I want to discuss to which extent we can measure these phenomena and model the underlying dynamics.

In the first part of my talk I will show how we can infer political spaces from data that correspond to different layers of a political cleavage. Cleavage theory (Lipset and Rokkan 1967, Deegan-Krause 2007) distinguishes three levels: 1) a difference in social structure, 2) common interests or values creating a sense of collective identity and 3) political alternatives in the form of voting alternatives. The data sets include electoral manifestos, retweet networks on Twitter and regional voting patterns. In the second part of the talk I will discuss how we can model the dynamics in these political spaces using models of opinion dynamics."

Biography

Eckehard Olbrich is group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences (MPI MiS) in the department "Geometry and Complex Systems". He has a PhD degree in theoretical physics. He has been working on several aspects of complex systems theory, such as information decomposition, complex networks, game theory, and mathematical modelling of social dynamics and communication with a focus on data analysis. Currently he is the coordinator of the HORIZON Europe project "Social media for democracy - Understanding the Causal Mechanisms of Digital Citizenship”.