HNDS-R: Populist Rhetoric on Social Media and Its Effects on Democracies

政治观察家和学者最近对社交媒体上民粹主义言论的兴起表示担忧，许多人认为这是对民主稳定与和平的威胁。该项目将记录民粹主义言论在全球民主国家社交媒体上的流行，并确定这种言论是如何传播的，以及它对民主的运作和质量有何影响。它将为大约80个国家的数万名候选人和数百个政党，在社交媒体上的政治沟通中产生一个新的大规模数据集，显示民粹主义的程度。分析这些数据将使研究人员能够了解民粹主义是否在全球范围内兴起，它在哪里最普遍，它是如何传播的，以及它是否侵蚀了民主。该项目的结果将有助于增进我们对这一对世界各地民主稳定的潜在威胁的了解。这个项目旨在促进我们对民粹主义在世界各地民主国家的传播和后果的理解。虽然人们普遍认为民粹主义在全球范围内呈上升趋势，但几乎没有关于政治精英使用民粹主义言论的可用数据。我们克服了这一限制，建立了一个庞大的跨国数据集，其中包括世界上所有主要民主党派在Facebook、Twitter和Instagram上发布的所有帖子，这构成了迄今为止最全面的在线精英言论报道。为了分析这些数据，我们扩展了多语言文本分析的新方法，以便共同分析以数十种独特语言交流的政党和政治家。最后，我们采用这些新的方法论发展来解决关键问题，不仅是民粹主义言论的盛行，还有它如何在政党内部和跨党派传播，以及它对公众的影响。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Political observers and scholars have recently expressed concern about the rise of populist rhetoric on social media, which many consider a threat to democratic stability and peace. This project will document the prevalence of populist rhetoric in social media in democracies globally, and determine how this rhetoric spreads and what are its consequences on the functioning and quality of democracy. It will produce a new massive dataset on the extent of populism in political communication on social media for tens of thousands of candidates and hundreds of parties across about 80 countries. Analyzing these data will allow researchers to understand whether populism is on the rise across the globe, where it is most prevalent, how it spreads, and whether it erodes democracy. The results of the project will contribute to improving our understanding of this potential threat to democratic stability around the world. This project aims to advance our understanding of the spread and consequences of populism in democracies around the world. While it is broadly understood that populism is on the rise globally, there is little available data on the use of populist rhetoric by political elites. We overcome this limitation by building a massive cross-national dataset of all posts from all major democratic parties in the world on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which constitutes the most comprehensive coverage of online elite rhetoric to date. To analyze this data, we extend new methods for multilingual text analysis in order to jointly analyze parties and politicians communicating in dozens of unique languages. Finally, we employ these new methodological developments to address critical questions about not just the prevalence of populist rhetoric, but how it spreads within and across parties, as well as its effects on the public.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.