Not All Moderates Are Equal
Clickstream Evidence from Argentina’s 2021 Election
Guadalupe González
May 6, 2024
What the literature said so far?
What the literature said so far?
Campbell et al. (1960) establish that Moderates and independents tend to show lower political interest, less information, and more unstable attitudes…
Klar and Krupnikov (2016) shows that not all moderates are equal and we can distinguish between moderates that are interested in politics and moderates that are not.
What the literature said so far?
Campbell et al. (1960) establish that Moderates and independents tend to show lower political interest, less information, and more unstable attitudes…
Klar and Krupnikov (2016) shows that not all moderates are equal and we can distinguish between moderates that are interested in politics and moderates that are not.
Research question
Research question
To what extent do politically interested moderates consume more diverse political information than uninterested moderates, as measured by entropy in clickstream data during Argentina’s 2021 election?
Clickstream Data (Browsing History)
Clickstream Data (Browsing History)
Clickstream Data (Browsing History)
How was the process?:
So I:
Filter the ones that are news portal
Scrape each url to get the title, description and the body of the news
Calculate information gain from all of them and,
Merge with my moderates data.
But how we identify a ‘moderate’ voter?
How can we measure how much informative it is a text?
What is entropy?
What is entropy?
Entropy is a way to measure how predictable or uncertain something is. In the context of news consumption, it tells us how diverse or concentrated the information exposure is.
How can we measure entropy?
Entropy=−n∑i=1pilog2(pi) Where:
- pi is the proportion of attention or consumption to source/topic i.
For Example…
For Example…
So, we can expect that…
So, we can expect that…
So, we can expect that…
Linear Regression
log(entropyi)=β0+β1⋅political interesti+β2⋅Agei+β3⋅Genderi+β4⋅Educationi+β5⋅Worki+εi
Some (parcial) results…
Some (parcial) results…
Regression in a plot
Regression in a plot
Conclusions
Use clickstream data to measure political interest and information it is a possibility.
There are moderates that are interest in politics.
There is a difference in the consumption of news by moderates with political interest and without.
Moderates with high political interest tend to review news with more information / diversity of information on
Limitations & next steps
‘Moderates’ as category that reflects ideological autoperception it is not the best approach.
‘Entropy’ as indicator has some flaws: what about repeat information or quality of information?
Correlation it is not causation.. is it possible to make causal claim that political interest decrease the effect on looking for information?
Appendix
References
Thank You for Your Attention! Questions?
r fontawesome::fa("envelope") guadag12@umd.edu
