Recent publications

UMUTEAM at DIPROMATS 2024: Feature Integration for Detecting Fine-grained Propaganda and Narrative

Published in IberLEF 2024, 2024

These notes describe our participation in the 2nd edition of the DIPROMATS shared task, held at IberLEF 2024. This edition repeated the fine-grained detection of propaganda techniques in politics and added an additional subtask for narrative detection, which consists of a multiclass and multi-label classification problem to classify a set of predefined narratives of international actors using few-shot learning. Both tasks are multilingual. For the first task, we propose an approach similar to the one used in the previous edition, combining linguistic features and sentence embeddings using ensemble learning and knowledge integration. For Task 1, we obtain our best result by applying knowledge integration. For the Task 2, we evaluate TuLu and Zephyr, but our results fall below the proposed baseline based on Mixtral 8x7B.

Recommended citation: García-Díaz, J. A., Pan, R., Lázaro, A. R., Cristancho, C., & Valencia-García, R. (2024). UMUTEAM at DIPROMATS 2024: Feature Integration for Detecting Fine-grained Propaganda and Narrative. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3756/DIPROMATS2024_paper5.pdf

The gender divide in issue attention

Published in European Journal of Political Research, 2021

This article explores the conditions under which female members of parliament are more likely than male MPs to participate in political debates relating to a range of issues. Building on descriptive representation theory and parliamentary behaviour studies, we examine how the effect of the number of women in parliament, and the access of women to leadership positions, affect the issue attention of MPs, and how these varies across policy areas and parliamentary venues. Oral questions asked by male and female MPs in plenary sessions and parliamentary committees in Spain from 1982 to 2018, show that numbers and leadership significantly affect female MPs’ attention to parliamentary activities that aim to highlight the merits of government action and in venues that are less open to public scrutiny. Our results also illustrate that the presence of women in parliament and their access to leadership positions have a significant impact on female MPs’ attention to rights- and welfare-related issues, but not issues traditionally linked to high-profile political areas such as national security, macroeconomic policy, and government affairs.

Recommended citation: Chaqués‐Bonafont, L., & Cristancho, C. (2022). The gender divide in issue attention. European Journal of Political Research, 61(1), 3–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12437

The cultural outcomes of social movements : a computational linguistics approach

Published in PArtecipazione e COnflitto, 2021

Scholars have long established the importance of the cultural outcomes of social movements in the context of political power and representation. However, they have also acknowledged the methodological difficulties associated with studying cultural outcomes, especially when culture is manifested through linguistic practices. This paper addresses the potential for dealing with movements and culture as manifested in sym- bols, public discourse, narratives, and rhetoric and makes two contributions: It links the social movement literature studying culture through language with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for systematic and comprehensive cultural analysis; and introduces a state-of the-art method which provides a better under- standing of language change and linguistic influence given the capacity of computational analyses to process large volumes of data for multiple actors and varied data sources during long periods of time. The paper describes the cultural influence of women organizations in Spain between 2000-2020 on issues such as gender inequalities, abortion, gender violence, prostitution, and surrogacy. Tweets and manifestos by women’s or- ganizations’, as well as national press coverage of women issues and interventions by MPs in the parliamentary arena, are used to describe the advantages and limitations of the method for the study of cultural outcomes. Computational linguistics provides new possibilities for scholarly research on cultural outcomes of social move- ments but also shows that these methods should be accompanied by precise definitions of cultural outcomes, detailed and replicable operationalisation processes, and theoretical models that identify the mechanisms that explain the linguistic phenomena that underly cultural change.

Recommended citation: Cristancho, C. (2021). The cultural outcomes of social movements : a computational linguistics approach. PArtecipazione e COnflitto, 7623(14), 1151–1179. 10.1285/i20356609v14i3p1151

La agenda de los grupos de interés frente a la COVID-19: el rastro digital en Twitter

Published in Revista Española de Ciencia Política, 2021

Interest groups are playing a fundamental role in solving the problems generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as they address multiple issues and represent social groups around an unprecedented social challenge. Multiple organizations express their constituents’concerns and demands every day, thus forging an agenda in which they debate how to deal with the multiple effects of the pandemic in various sectors. However, given the dynamics of attention inherent to the emergency situation and the diversity of issues, it is difficult to follow the diver- sity and complexity of multiple actors and issues. This article describes the agenda of interest groups in Spain, based on the publications on Twitter by the 140 most active organizations between March 2018 and March 2021. Using automated text classification, it is possible to conclude that the aggregate attention by types of interest groups to the main items on the agenda vary little after the outbreak of the crisis caused by the pandemic. Attention to the health, socio-political and economic dimensions related to COVID-19 follows similar patterns among the different types of groups and is transversal to the issues on the agenda. These results show that interest groups continue to carry out their interest representation function without significantly altering their behaviour in response to the crisis.

Recommended citation: Cristancho, C. (2021). La agenda de los grupos de interés frente a la COVID-19: el rastro digital en Twitter. Revista Española de Ciencia Política, 57, 45–75. https://doi.org/10.21308/recp.57.02

Protesters at the news gates: An experimental study of journalists’ news judgment of protest events

Published in COMMUNICATIONS, 2021

Media attention is a key political resource for protesters. This implies that journalists are a crucial audience to which protesters seek to appeal. We study to what extent features of protest, of journalists, and of news organizations affect journalists’ news judgment. We exposed 78 Spanish journalists to vignettes of asylum seeker protests. Four features were systematically manipulated: protesters’ worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (WUNC). The experiments scrutinize the extent to which journalists consider a protest newsworthy (presence) and the likelihood that a protest is featured on a newspaper’s front page (prominence) . Our results show that in terms of media presence, high turnout is key. Highly unified protesters, in contrast, are considered less newsworthy. Regarding prominence, strongly committed demonstrators more easily make it to the frontpage. Individual characteristics of journalists have no direct effect on news judgment. Journalists’ editorial status and ideological (outlet) placement only moderate the effect of some of the protest features, although in terms of front-page placement a more potent adversary versus ally effect is distinguished.

Recommended citation: Cristancho, C., & Wouters, R. (2021). Protesters at the news gates: An experimental study of journalists’ news judgment of protest events. Communications. https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2020-0023

The contingent character of interest groups–political parties’ interaction

Published in Journal of Public Policy, 2020

This article examines the conditions under which interest groups interact with political parties. Existing research finds that interest group–political party interactions in most western democracies have become more open and contingent over time. The close ideological and formal organisational ties that once characterised these relations have gradually been replaced by alternative, more pragmatic forms of cooperation. However, most of this research stresses the importance of the structural factors underpinning these links over time and across countries, but sheds little light on the factors driving short-term interest group–party interactions. Here, by drawing on survey data on Spanish interest groups obtained between December 2016 and May 2017, this article seeks to fill this gap by taking into account party status, issue salience and a group’s resources as explanatory variables. It shows that mainstream parties are the primary targets of interest groups, that groups dealing with salient issues are more likely to contact political parties and that the groups with most resources interact with a larger number of parties.

Recommended citation: Chaqués-Bonafont, L., Cristancho, C., Muñoz-Márquez, L., & Rincón, L. (2021). The contingent character of interest groups–political parties’ interaction. Journal of Public Policy, 41(3), 440–461 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0143814X20000082

Camilo Cristancho