Digital Political Communication in Multilingual Settings: Theoretical Implications and Methodological Challenges

Abstract

Globalisation has forged connections between countries and communities and thus established a multilingual communication background against which domestic and international politics take place (Fraser, 2007; Held et al., 1999; Kymlicka, 2007). The digital transformation has further strengthened these ties, embedding a diversity of actors in horizontal communication networks that expand and reconfigure existing information flows (Blumler & Kavanagh, 1999; Benkler, 2006; Castells, 2012). The multilingual reality of politics notwithstanding, most studies of political communication are based on the premise of a culturally homogeneous and isolated nation state. It thus largely remains an open question how communication patterns are organised across and between countries and their cultural-linguistic communities. This is not least due to the fact that multilingual political communication processes pose a number of substantive methodological challenges to researchers. It is precisely these points that the present panel addresses. Adopting a comparative computational perspective, the contributions (a) investigate agenda diffusion dynamics in transnational and translingual contexts; (b) examine campaigns and news coverage patterns in multilingual contexts within and across countries; and (c) present computational solutions to the challenges posed by the analysis of multilingual corpora. (a) Transnationality. While much of today’s political communication is located in transnational spaces, we still know little about the mechanisms that organise the transnational and translingual flows of topics and viewpoints. Contribution (1) explores the dynamics that govern the transnational debate between climate sceptics and climate advocates online. The paper analyses how different national political contexts are tied together, how strongly climate agendas are disseminated within and between the opposing camps, and how central the media are in organising the communication flow. (b) Multilingual national and international contexts. Many countries are defined by multicultural settings, where linguistic fault lines often coincide with those that mark political conflict. Contribution (2) analyses the role of bots, “trolls” and “elves” in the Ukrainian presidential and parliamentary elections, documenting how linguistic-political differences between Ukrainian and Russian are mirrored computational propaganda strategies. Contribution (3) takes a longitudinal perspective and compares the degree to which news coverage in liberal and democratic-corporatist media systems (Hallin & Mancini, 2004) has become convergent in terms of topics and viewpoints. While information diversity is central to citizens’ opinion formation in democratic societies, economic pressures faced by the media should lead in all systems towards greater convergence. This trend should be particularly pronounced in liberal compared to democratic-corporatist systems. (c) Methodological challenges. Multilingual settings pose substantive challenges, as defining functionally equivalent expressions and topics across languages can prove to be elusive. Contribution (4) compares a machine translation to a dictionary-based approach of Twitter data in English, Hebrew and Arabic on the West Bank conflict, outlining the differences in the results as well as their advantages and drawbacks. Contribution (5) discusses an alternative approach. Taking the current European migration debate in different languages and text sources as an example, the authors demonstrate how polylingual topic models can be used, which take advantage of hyperlink connections between documents and can thus reduce the costs associated with translation routines.

Title	Details
Contribution (5): Assessing Strategies for Topic Modeling of Multilingual Text Collections in Communication Research	View Paper Details
Contribution (1): Who Said it First? Transnational and Translingual Agenda Diffusion in the Global Climate Change Debate	View Paper Details
Contribution (2): Do Bots and Trolls Speak the Same Language? Actor-Based Analysis of Computational Propaganda in a Multilingual Setting	View Paper Details
Contribution (4): A Bridge Over the Language Gap: Employing Topic Modelling for Text Analyses Across Languages for Country Comparative Research	View Paper Details