Technology as a Salient Political Issue and the Emergence of Pirate Parties

• In Event: Political Organizations and Parties & Political Networks & American Political Thought & Education Politics and Policy Virtual Poster Session
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Abstract

Using Text Analysis, this paper uncovers the rhetoric parties use to activate a new issue dimension—technology. We hypothesize that parties are converging in their use of rhetoric concerning this dimension, and that they are activating the dimension to gain electoral benefits. Using manifestos collected from the CMP API, and other party manifestos collected by hand, we show that parties are increasingly addressing technology as its own issue space and not as a subsection of other extant dimensions. While the prevalence of technology in political discourse has naturally increased with the developments in that sector, special attention is paid to arguably the first new party of the 21st century: The Pirates and their technocratic platform.

The Pirate party family has gained notoriety for its niche policy platform, which focuses largely on issues that deal with expanded access to technology and its development. We use party manifestos as the focal point of our investigation, as we expect Pirates to be using the most topical language surrounding this issue space. We employ machine learning, consisting of Singular Value Decomposition, to find the topics with which Pirate manifestos are most associated. In preliminary iterations, we have found such topics to include words such as: “tech," “internet," “youth," “grow," and “inform." Subsequently, using these terms we see how other parties are clustered on those dimensions. As most parties are clustered together on these dimensions, we demonstrate that Pirate Party entries are instances of activating a novel issue dimension. Moreover, the persistence of technological rhetoric in these electoral spaces shows that the dimension has increased in salience over time. In modeling this phenomenon, this paper adds to the literature on Issue Saliency and New Party Emergence.

Authors

• Reese Zavala

• Nathan Henceroth, Albright College