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When Groups Fall Apart: Identifying Transnational Polarization During the Arab Uprisings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2021

Robert Kubinec Open the ORCID record for Robert Kubinec [Opens in a new window]  and
John Owen
Robert Kubinec*
Affiliation:
Division of Social Sciences, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Email: [email protected]
John Owen
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
*
Corresponding author Robert Kubinec
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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 statisticslatest variablestransnational diffusion
Type
Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 522 - 540
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology

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Footnotes

Edited by Jeff Gill

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Kubinec and Owen Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/Z6BCTJ
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