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

2022 , COUYOUMDJIAN NETTLE, JUAN PABLO , RAVEAU MORALES, MARÍA PAZ , CANDIA VALLEJOS, CRISTIAN ESTEBAN

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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.

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The chilean constituent process: A Computational Social Science approach

2022 , RAVEAU MORALES, MARÍA PAZ

In October 2015, the government of Chile started a constitution-making process, which allowed citizen participation. During the participatory phase, citizens gathered in local selfconvoked encounters to debate on four dimensions: constitutional values, rights, duties, and institutions. For each one of these four dimensions, participants collectively selected seven concepts from a list provided by the government or added new ones. For each concept, they wrote down a short argument explaining why this concept should be included in the new constitution. Although this process did not result in a new Constitution, the citizen consultation resulted in a valuable and unique source of information about people’s social and political preferences. The first objective of this work is related to the constitutional process itself and the citizen participation. The Chilean process exhibited two critical design weaknesses we analyze here. The first one is representativeness: the voluntary nature of the encounters increased participation biases, as those citizens who support the acting government were more likely to participate in the consultation. We study the determining factors of citizen participation in ELAs by setting up various regression models at the municipality-level. We found that engagement in politics and support for the government increases participation, which suggests that citizen involvement in the constitutional process may have been ideologically driven. The second weakness is the group deliberation quality. For a public deliberation to produce epistemic superiority, all the participants should have access to relevant and accurate information and evidence. Then, we analyze the written arguments for each selected concept, using structural topic modeling and natural language processing. We show that the emergent content can be ideologically differentiated, and that groups from municipalities with higher socioeconomic index, on average, produce higher-quality deliberation compared to groups from less developed municipalities. The second object of study comes from the data. The dataset gathered in the local participatory phase provides a rich source of information about people’s political preferences. To map the political ideology, we built co-occurrence networks where the nodes represent the constitutional concepts, and the links represent the association among them. Then, we aim to discover the structure of the ideology by examining the resulting networks, and identifying clusters - highly connected groups of concepts - inside them. The communities we found are consistent with the political conglomerates existing in Chile in 2016. Finally, using natural language processing techniques, we extracted psycho-linguistic features from the argument texts. These features are “internal factors”, for they respond to the intrinsic psychological, emotional, attitudinal or cognitive state of the subject, which affects their political ideology. Next, we set up a discrete choice model to study the effect of those features in cluster membership. We find that the progressive-left cluster shows a more propositive and non-agentic attitude when referring to values, as opposed to the traditional left. Regarding the dimension of rights, the right-wing cluster displays a more valorative attitude, suggesting that first-generation rights may also play the role of values. Throughout all chapters, and by the methods we use, this work attempts to contribute to the field of computational social science

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Survey data - Proceso Constituyente Abierto a la Ciudadanía

2017 , RAVEAU MORALES, MARÍA PAZ

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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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An experiential account of a large-scale interdisciplinary data analysis of public engagement

2022 , Julian “Iñaki” Goñi , Claudio Fuentes , RAVEAU MORALES, MARÍA PAZ

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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.