A laboratory seminar on political polarization was held
On February 25, the laboratory held its regular seminar, featuring presentations by Georgy Mamvriysky and Andrey Akhremko.
Contemporary studies of political polarization focus much more on mass attitudes and intergroup differences among citizens, while polarization at the level of political elites has been studied considerably less. This area of research appears particularly promising in the context of foreign policy, which has so far been relatively rarely considered in studies of polarization.
At the recent seminar, Georgy Mamvriysky presented a paper entitled “The Relationship Between Affective Polarization and the Level of Foreign Policy Consensus in the US Senate.” Particular attention was paid to contemporary research on elite polarization: the main approaches to its conceptualization, key conclusions from the literature, and limitations of existing studies, especially in the context of foreign policy, were examined. The discussion focused on the analysis of official transcripts of congressional hearings as a promising source of data for studying political rhetoric and interparty differences. Separately, possible approaches to conceptualizing and operationalizing affective polarization were discussed in the analysis of US Senate transcripts using NLP models. We thank all participants for their attention and interest in the topic.
