Work Package 2
To establish the link between democratic (authoritarian) tools of indoctrination and the lasting support among ordinary citizens, DEMED will be the first project to create unique overtime comparative measures of political culture relying on different forms of data.
Measuring political culture using cross-national surveys: In a first step, we plan to test our new theoretical framework, using a newly established and innovative methodology by team member Dr Claassen (Glasgow) for measuring authoritarian and democratic values.
Measuring political culture using social media data: To validate and complement the measures of political culture, we will further create innovative measures of political culture using social media content. Available on social media for analysis are the thoughts and colloquially expressed opinions of billions of people. This project leverages an existing database of five billion tweets, collected by team member Dr Wilson (Brandeis) since 2012. This dataset represents the full text, location and other meta-data for some five billion tweets, worldwide. This data represents an extraordinarily rich sample of the political discourse throughout the developing and developed world.