I’m speaking in the next session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, which is on deliberation and polarisation, but we begin with Hilke Brockmann, whose focus is on ‘echo chambers’ amongst political elites. These are believed to be a risk to democratic processes, and driven by algorithmic processes; but these ideas have rightly been challenged in recent years. We would do better to focus on polarised interactions between political elites, and especially on the margins of the political environment, and this may be intensified by external political events.
The present study examined this by assessing tweets by all Eu parliamentarians and commissioners in the months before and after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022; it used topic modelling and sentiment analysis to assess the structure of the networks between these politicians, and the distribution of such themes and sentiments.
There are differences between groups based on left-right ideological positioning, and on positioning towards the European Union; this is described here as being in extreme, moderate, or no ‘echo chambers’, though it’s not clear exactly what that means. Such tendencies are driven by the fact that politicians who communicated extremely negatively on the platform receive more attention and engagement; and the patterns change towards greater polarisation in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
