Analysis of political data and output of it through apps.
This project has its foundation on the electoral manifestos in markdown form, which are retrieved from Política Para Todos. I highly recommend exploring their GitHub and their page for other projects and a better understanding of Portuguese political data.
A common way to visualise the content of a text is through a word cloud, a visual representation of the most frequent words in a text. Beyond just displaying the most frequent words, I do some pre-processing, including:
- Removing punctuation
- Removing stop words
- Removing words with less than 3 characters
- Keeping nouns, adjectives, verbs and interjections
The style for this type of word cloud was obtained from this article.
Politics tends to mainly address a set of core topics, for which each party defines their priority and intentions. In order to better understand their stance and how it correlates to our own, I created a simple regex process to estimate the percentage of sentences in the parties' manifesto that address each of the following topics:
- Climate
- Economy
- Education
- Health
- Infrastructure
- Science
- Social causes
- Politics and ideology
- Technology and entrepreneurship
You can see which words are defined for each topic here.
Forming partnerships and setting coalitions is ever more crucial in modern politics. This might be harder to achieve if a party has profoundly negative and critical communication. In order to assess each party's "negativity", I've applied a sentiment analysis model to their manifestos, getting the percentage of sentences that are:
- Neutral
- Positive
- Negative
A recent study explored the decline of rationalism in favor of intuition over the last decades. A potential implication of this is that politics might become less scientific and rational, ending up more emotional and manipulative. So, inspired by the paper, I've created a simple regex process to estimate the percentage of sentences in the parties' manifesto that are:
- Rational
- Intuitive
You can see which words are defined for each approach here.
The rise of populism and extremism often comes along with a rise in hate speech. As such, I've thought that it would be interesting to see what hate speech exists in each party's manifesto. For this task, I've used an hate speech detection model from HuggingFace Models.