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Publication

The lexical divide: propositive modes and non-agentic attitudes define the progressive left in Chile

2024 , RAVEAU MORALES, MARÍA PAZ , COUYOUMDJIAN NETTLE, JUAN PABLO , Claudio Fuentes-Bravo , RODRÍGUEZ SICKERT, CARLOS ANDRÉS , CANDIA VALLEJOS, CRISTIAN ESTEBAN

Internal factors-such as psychological traits or individual attitudes-relate to and explain political cleavages. Yet, little is known about how locus of control, agency, and modal attitudes impact political ideology. Utilizing textual analysis within the context of the Chilean 2015 constituent process, we go beyond traditional survey methods to explore community clusters in “Values” and “Rights” networks built upon the deliberation of 106,000 people. Our findings reveal distinct attitudinal patterns across political orientations: the progressive left generally exhibits a more propositive and non-agentic attitude, the traditional left adopts an evaluative stance towards values, and the right-wing community leans towards a factual attitude but shifts to an evaluative stance when discussing rights. These results underscore the role of psychological constructs in shaping political ideologies and introduce textual analysis as a robust tool for psychological and political inquiry. The study offers a comprehensive understanding of the complexities of political behavior and provides a new lens through which to examine the psychology of political ideology.

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Citizens at the forefront of the constitutional debate: Voluntary citizen participation determinants and emergent content in Chile

2022 , RAVEAU MORALES, MARÍA PAZ , COUYOUMDJIAN NETTLE, JUAN PABLO , Claudio Fuentes-Bravo , RODRÍGUEZ SICKERT, CARLOS ANDRÉS , CANDIA VALLEJOS, CRISTIAN ESTEBAN , Alessandro Pluchino

In the past few decades, constitution-making processes have shifted from being undertakings performed by elites and closed off from the public to ones incorporating democratic mechanisms. Little is known, however, about the determinants of voluntary public participation and how they affect the outcomes of the deliberative process in terms of content and quality. Here, we study the process of constituent involvement in the rewriting of Chile’s constitution in 2016. A total of 106, 412 citizens in 8, 113 different local encounters voluntarily congregated in groups of ten or more to collectively determine what social rights should be considered for inclusion in the new constitution, deliberating and then articulating in the written word why should be included. We brought our data to statistical regression models at the municipality level, the results show that the main determinants associated with increasing citizen participation are educational level, engagement in politics, support for the government, and Internet access. In contrast, population density and the share of Evangelical Christians in the general population decrease citizen participation. Then, we further analyze the written arguments for each collectively-selected constitutional rights. The findings suggest that groups from socioeconomically developed municipalities (with higher educational levels and where the main economic activities are more distant from natural resources), on average, deliberate consistently more about themes, concepts, and ideas compared to groups from less developed municipalities. These results provide an empirical ground on the driver factors of voluntary citizen participation and on the benefits and disadvantages of deliberative democracy. Hence, results can inform the organization of new deliberative processes.

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“It's not the what but (also) the how”: characterizing left-wing populism in political texts

2024 , RAVEAU MORALES, MARÍA PAZ , Claudio Fuentes-Bravo , FERNÁNDEZ PLAZA, MIGUEL ÁNGEL , COUYOUMDJIAN NETTLE, JUAN PABLO , DEL SOLAR ZAÑARTU, MARIA JOSE

Despite all the elasticity and even ambiguity surrounding the concept of populism, the existing paradigms converge in the recognition of a populist rhetoric. By using Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools we propose a set of linguistic and discursive markers to identify populist markers in Presidential speeches. The performance of these markers is subsequently tested against the Global Populism Database (GPD). We set-up a multinomial regression model to study the predictive power of these markers on the GPD populist score, focusing on left-wing populist leaders in Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. We are thus able to characterize (left-wing) populism as a style of communication, as well as to understand what is behind this rhetoric. Our results show that ingroup and emotional content are more present in populist speeches. We also find a positive relation between populism and the use future tense and conditional connectors, which suggest an intention to manipulate the audience. These results have implications both for the current understanding of (left-wing) populist rhetoric and for the conceptualization of populism itself.

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Mapping the complexity of political ideology using emergent networks: the Chilean case

2022 , RAVEAU MORALES, MARÍA PAZ , COUYOUMDJIAN NETTLE, JUAN PABLO , Claudio Fuentes-Bravo

AbstractWe propose a method to characterize political ideology using network theory. Our analysis is based on the 2015–2016 Chilean constituent process, where self-convened meetings were held throughout the country to discuss which Values, Rights, Duties, and Institutions should be included in the new constitution. Using this unique dataset, co-occurrence networks were constructed by considering the concepts selected in different meetings. The nodes are the concepts, and a link between two nodes represents the association between them. Political ideology is thus analyzed as an emergent network, and we can identify the main ideological communities in Chile and describe their characteristics. Beyond the local results, the proposed methodology enables representing the diversity of a community’s political orientations in a realistic ecological context.