Hi all,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed next Wednesday October 16, at 9:30 AM PST / 16:30 UTC. Find your local time here https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1729096200. With numerous elections taking place all around the world this year, the theme for this showcase is *Wikipedia for Political and Election Analysis*.
You are welcome to watch via the YouTube stream: https://youtube.com/live/61j55R7UZZA?feature=share. As usual, you can join the conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the showcase goes live.
This month's presentations: *Throw Your Hat in the Ring (of Wikipedia): **Exploring Urban-Rural Disparities in Local Politicians' Information Supply*By *Akira Matsui, Yokohama National University*This talk explores the socio-economic factors contributing to disparities in the supply of local political information on Wikipedia. Using a dataset of politicians who ran for local elections in Japan, the research investigates the relationship between socio-economic status and creating and revising politicians' Wikipedia pages. The study reveals that areas with different socio-economic backgrounds, such as employment industries and age distribution, exhibit distinct patterns in information supply. The findings underscore the impact of regional socio-economic factors on digital platforms and highlight potential vulnerabilities in information access for political content.Party positions from Wikipedia classifications of party ideologyBy *Michael Herrmann, University of Konstanz*We develop a new measure of party position based on a scaling of ideology tags supplied in infoboxes on political parties' Wikipedia pages. Assuming a simple model of tag assignment, we estimate the locations of parties and ideologies in a common space. We find that the recovered scale can be interpreted in familiar terms of "left versus right." Estimated party positions correlate well with ratings of parties' positions from extant large-scale expert surveys, most strongly with ratings of general left-right ideology. Party position estimates also show high stability in a test-retest scenario. Our results demonstrate that a Wikipedia-based approach yields valid and reliable left-right scores comparable to scores obtained via conventional expert coding methods. It thus provides a measure with potentially unlimited party coverage. Our measurement strategy is also applicable to other entities. Best,Kinneret