@article{4892b614ea784ac89ecabdfe2d0d7af8,
title = "When Groups Fall Apart: Identifying Transnational Polarization during the Arab Uprisings",
abstract = "It is very difficult to know how international social linkages affect domestic ideological polarization because we can never observe polarization occurring both with and without international connections. To estimate this missing counterfactual, we employ a new statistical method based on Bayesian item-response theory that permits us to disaggregate polarization after the Arab Uprisings into domestic and transnational components. We collected a dataset of Twitter accounts in Egypt and Tunisia during the critical year of 2013, when the Egyptian military overthrew the Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. We find that the coup increased retweets among Egyptian ideological allies by 50% each day following the coup and decreased cross-ideological retweets by 25%. Tunisian Twitter communities also showed stronger intragroup retweeting although at lower levels than in Egypt. Counter-intuitively, our model shows that the additional polarization in Tunisia after the coup appears to have dampened further polarization among Islamists in Egypt. ",
keywords = "Bayesian statistics, latest variables, transnational diffusion",
author = "Robert Kubinec and John Owen",
note = "Funding Information: We thank Steven Livingston and meeting participants at the 2017 American Political Science Association Annual Conference, the 2018 Annual Conference on Politics and Computational Social Science, and New York University{\textquoteright}s Social Media and Political Participation Lab for valuable criticism. The authors thank the Amb. Henry J. and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Chair at the University of Virginia for research funding. John Owen thanks the Liu Institute at the University of British Columbia, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Otto Suhr Institute at Free University of Berlin, and the Global Governance Group at the WZB Berlin Social Science Research Center for institutional support. Robert Kubinec thanks the University of Virginia{\textquoteright}s Quantitative Collaborative and New York University Abu Dhabi for computing resources and Jonathan Kropko and Hudson Golino for helpful feedback on this project. We thank Hana Nasser, Chen Wang, Nicholas Mares, Ilana Shapiro, Dana Moyer, and Howe Whitman for invaluable research assistance. We thank the Stan team for help with debugging parallelization code. Funding Information: This work was supported by the University of Virginia{\textquoteright}s Quantitative Collaborative and by the Social Sciences Division of New York University Abu Dhabi. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} ",
year = "2021",
month = oct,
day = "5",
doi = "10.1017/pan.2020.46",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "29",
pages = "522--540",
journal = "Political Analysis",
issn = "1047-1987",
publisher = "Oxford University Press",
number = "4",
}