Mapping the political landscape from data traces: multidimensional opinions of users, politicians and media outlets on X

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multidimensional dataset capturing political stances of users, politicians, and media outlets on X/Twitter across various ideological and issue dimensions, enabling broader analysis of online political landscapes.

Contribution

It presents a novel dataset that models political opinions across multiple dimensions beyond traditional scales, applicable to diverse political systems and online ecosystems.

Findings

Validated positions of entities using several benchmarks

Demonstrated applications for analyzing political diversity and polarization

Provided indicators of activity and popularity for entities

Abstract

Studying political activity on social media often requires defining and measuring political stances of users or content. Relevant examples include the study of opinion polarization, or the study of political diversity in online content diets. While many research designs rely on operationalizations best suited for the US setting, few allow addressing more general political systems, in which users and media outlets might exhibit stances on multiple ideology and issue dimensions, going beyond traditional Liberal-Conservative or Left-Right scales. To advance the study of more general online ecosystems, we present a dataset pertaining to a population of X/Twitter users, parliamentarians, and media outlets embedded in a political space spanned by dimensions measuring attitudes towards immigration, the EU, liberal values, elites and institutions, nationalism and the environment, in addition to left-right and liberal-conservative scales. We include indicators of individual activity and popularity: mean number of posts per day, number of followers, and number of followees. We provide several benchmarks validating the positions of these entities and discuss several applications for this dataset.