Old Questions, New Techniques: A Research Note on the Computational Identification of Political Elites
Jacqueline Hicksa b, Vincent Traaga b, Ridho Reinandaa b
- aElite Network Shifts Project, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Reuvensplaats 2, 2311 BE Leiden and Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam (ISLA), University of AmsterdamScience Park 904, 1098 xh Amsterdam
- bElite Network Shifts Project, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Reuvensplaats 2, 2311 BE Leiden and Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam (ISLA), University of Amsterdam Science Park 904, 1098 xhAmsterdam
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Abstract
This paper presents a new method of identifying a nation’s political elite using computational techniques on digitised newspaper articles. It begins by describing the three most widely used methods of identifying political elites: positional, decisional and reputational. It then introduces the “reported elite method”, exploring the kinds of elites it detects and how well it reflects the composition of political elites in our case study of Indonesia. Compared to the other existing methods, we find that our method casts a much wider net when searching for political elites, resulting in many more people from civil society, far fewer formal politicians, and challenging conventional notions of who is a political elite. The method has two major underlying assumptions: (1) the newspapers from which the texts are drawn are free and fairly representative and (2) political power can be inferred from frequent appearance in newspapers alongside other frequently appearing individuals in computational “communities” of political elite.