Cohesion and Coalition Formation in the European Parliament: Roll-Call Votes and Twitter Activities

Autor: Igor Mozetič, Miha Grčar, Andreas Karpf, Darko Cherepnalkoski
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2016
Předmět:
FOS: Computer and information sciences
Economics
lcsh:Medicine
Social Sciences
Datasets as Topic
Elections
01 natural sciences
Monetary Policy
010104 statistics & probability
Computer Science - Computers and Society
Governments
Mathematical and Statistical Techniques
Sociology
050602 political science & public administration
Psychology
Cooperative Behavior
lcsh:Science
Policy Making
media_common
Multidisciplinary
Computer Science - Computation and Language
05 social sciences
Politics
Social Communication
Computer Science - Social and Information Networks
16. Peace & justice
0506 political science
Cohesion (linguistics)
Social Networks
Physical Sciences
Social psychology
Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Network Analysis
Statistics (Mathematics)
Research Article
Political Parties
Computer and Information Sciences
Parliament
media_common.quotation_subject
Political Science
Twitter
Research and Analysis Methods
Political science
Exponential random graph models
Computers and Society (cs.CY)
media_common.cataloged_instance
Humans
Social media
European Union
0101 mathematics
European union
Statistical Methods
Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
Roll call
Political Systems
udc:004.7
lcsh:R
Perspective (graphical)
Biology and Life Sciences
Communications
Collective Human Behavior
Public Finance
lcsh:Q
Social Media
Mathematics
Finance
Meta-Analysis
Zdroj: PLoS ONE
PloS one, vol. 11, no. 11, pp. 0166586-1-0166586-27, 2016.
PLOS ONE
PLoS ONE, Vol 11, Iss 11, p e0166586 (2016)
ISSN: 1932-6203
Popis: We study the cohesion within and the coalitions between political groups in the Eighth European Parliament (2014--2019) by analyzing two entirely different aspects of the behavior of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the policy-making processes. On one hand, we analyze their co-voting patterns and, on the other, their retweeting behavior. We make use of two diverse datasets in the analysis. The first one is the roll-call vote dataset, where cohesion is regarded as the tendency to co-vote within a group, and a coalition is formed when the members of several groups exhibit a high degree of co-voting agreement on a subject. The second dataset comes from Twitter; it captures the retweeting (i.e., endorsing) behavior of the MEPs and implies cohesion (retweets within the same group) and coalitions (retweets between groups) from a completely different perspective. We employ two different methodologies to analyze the cohesion and coalitions. The first one is based on Krippendorff's Alpha reliability, used to measure the agreement between raters in data-analysis scenarios, and the second one is based on Exponential Random Graph Models, often used in social-network analysis. We give general insights into the cohesion of political groups in the European Parliament, explore whether coalitions are formed in the same way for different policy areas, and examine to what degree the retweeting behavior of MEPs corresponds to their co-voting patterns. A novel and interesting aspect of our work is the relationship between the co-voting and retweeting patterns.
Databáze: OpenAIRE