17:45 - 20:00
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Marco Steenbergen
Discussant/s:
Tom Paskhalis
Meeting Room H

Yi-nung Tsai, Dechun Zhang, David, Yen-Chieh Liao
Factionalism and Red Guards under the Cultural Revolution: Ideal Point Estimation Using Text-as-Data Scaling Method

Garret Binding, Marco Steenbergen, Jelle Koedam
What's in a Dimension? The Western European Political Space from a Comparative Perspective

Hioroki Kubo
Does Intra-District Polarization Cause Party Polarization in Congress?

Adriana Bunea, Reto Wueest
Mapping the policy space of public stakeholder consultations: Evidence from the European Union.
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Factionalism and Red Guards under the Cultural Revolution: Ideal Point Estimation Using Text-as-Data Scaling Method
Yi-nung Tsai 1, Dechun Zhang 2, David, Yen-Chieh Liao 3
1 PhD candidate, Department of Political Science, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
2 PhD Candidate, The Leiden University Institute for Area Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University
3 PhD Candidate, Department of Government, University of Essex

This article estimates the spatial positioning of political elites and participants in the Cultural Revolution through analyzing expressed political views in propaganda manifesto in China. Prior theoretical research indicates that political elites and the Red Guards lost control of the social movement, and it evolved into sheer verbal violence and physical skirmishes across all provinces in the end (MacFarquhar and Schoenhals 2006; Walder 2009; Wang 1995). We show that in this political chaos, the Red Guards were conflicted internally and bi-polarizedly divided, attacking each other in self-printed propaganda, such as big-character posters (大字报 dazibao), tabloids (小报 xiao bao), and so on. Particularly, this paper analyzes the texts in the collection of these prints archived in Chinese Cultural Revolution Database. In this paper, we combine TextRank algorithm to extract key Chinese phrases, and the Poisson scaling model (Wordfish) as in Slapin and Proksch (2008) and Proksch and Slapin (2009) to estimate the differences of spatial positions using the extracted textual data covering the revolution. Results empirically extrapolate the inability of political elites to control mass movements, in alignment with the literature.

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