Nationalism as a Partisan Cultural Repertoire: A Computational Analysis of Narrative and Semantic Divergences

• In Event: Formal Models and Methods for the Study of Culture and Meaning (Co-sponsored by Sociology of Culture Section)

Abstract

Nationalism is often described as a diffuse cultural domain, yet empirical research has struggled to capture the narrative and relational structures through which political actors assemble national identity. This paper advances a Dual Narrative-Repertoire Framework that renders these cultural meaning structures empirically tractable by distinguishing between internal identity narratives, which articulates who “we” are, and external relational narratives, which position significant others within a moral and geopolitical field. Methodologically, we integrate narrative structural extraction using Subject-Verb-Object patterns with diachronic semantic projection based on sentence embeddings, enabling systematic analysis of how actors draw on shared cultural materials to construct repertoires of national identity.
We apply this approach to South Korean presidential commemorative speeches since the founding of the Republic (1948-2024), a setting that combines a ritualized commemorative calendar with a postcolonial legacy and a historically charged relationship with Japan. Even within the same ceremonial formats, conservative and liberal presidents diverge sharply in their internal identity narratives: conservatives emphasize sovereignty, security, and cultural heritage, while liberals highlight democracy, rights, and Korea’s global standing. These internal emphases correspond to contrasting relational stances toward Japan, with conservatives framing Japan as an external diplomatic counterpart and liberals treating it as an internalized moral problem rooted in unresolved historical injustice.
Together, these patterns complicate the classical view of nationalism as a cohesive symbolic project. They show instead how partisan actors selectively mobilize shared cultural materials to produce divergent accounts of national belonging and to position significant others in ways that reinforce competing moral visions of the nation. Our study offers a computational framework for analyzing the meaning structures through which nationalism is dynamically mobilized and contested, and through which nationalist polarization takes shape in contemporary democracies.

Authors

• Jaemin Lee, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Siwei Qin, The Chinese University of Hong Kong