Elite Polarization in South Korea: Evidence from a Natural Language Processing Model

• Published in: Journal of East Asian studies Vol. 22; no. 1; pp. 45 - 75
• Main Author: Han, Seungwoo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.03.2022; 동아시아연구원
• Subjects: Analysis; Bidirectionality; Classification; Committees; Computational linguistics; Democracy; Democratization; Elites; Foreign policy; Ideology; Language; Language processing; Language usage; Legislation; Methods; Natural language interfaces; Natural language processing; Neural networks; Partisanship; Polarization; Polarization (Social sciences); Political parties; Politics; 지역학; South Korea; United States > US; South Korea; BERT; text classification; political polarization; natural language processing; elite polarization
• ISSN: 1598-2408; 2234-6643; 2234-6643
• DOI: 10.1017/jea.2021.36

This study analyzes political polarization among the South Korean elite by examining 17 years’ worth of subcommittee meeting minutes from the South Korean National Assembly's standing committees. Its analysis applies various natural language processing techniques and the bidirectional encoder representations from the transformers model to measure and analyze polarization in the language used during these meetings. Its findings indicate that the degree of political polarization increased and decreased at various times over the study period but has risen sharply since the second half of 2016 and remained high throughout 2020. This result suggests that partisan political gaps between members of the South Korean National Assembly increase substantially.