Relationship between ideology and language in the Catalan independence context

TL;DR

This study examines how political opinions and language use are intertwined in the Catalan independence debate by analyzing Twitter data, revealing polarization, influential users' extremity, and language preferences linked to political stance.

Contribution

It introduces a model to infer opinion distributions from Twitter interactions and demonstrates the relationship between political positions and language use in a polarized territorial dispute.

Findings

Opinion distribution is mainly bimodal with a less polarized third pole.

More active users tend to hold more extreme opinions.

Language use correlates with political stance, with pro-independence users favoring Catalan.

Abstract

Political polarization generates strong effects on society, driving controversial debates and influencing the institutions. Territorial disputes are one of the most important polarized scenarios and have been consistently related to the use of language. In this work, we analyzed the opinion and language distributions through Twitter data of a particular territorial dispute around the independence of Catalonia. We infer a continuous opinion distribution by applying a model based on retweet interactions, previously detecting elite users with fixed and antagonist opinions. The resulting distribution presents a mainly bimodal behavior with an intermediate third pole that shows a less polarized society with the presence of not only antagonist opinions. We find that the more active, engaged and influential users hold more extreme positions. Also we prove that there is a clear relationship between political positions and the use of language, showing that against independence users speak mainly Spanish while pro-independence users speak Catalan and Spanish almost indistinctly. However, the third pole, closer in political opinion to the pro-independence pole, behaves similarly to the against-independence one concerning the use of language.