Natural Language Processing for the Analysis of the Political Characterisation of Migration in the Croatian Political Discourse

This paper tackles the issue of analyst bias in performance of comparative political analyses on political discourse, by leveraging data and machine-learning over human prior knowledge. The case studied is characterization of the issue of migration in the Croatian political discourse, which was chosen arbitrarily. We developed a machine-learning system that identifies most prominent features in the Croatian political discourse, with regards to migration and were interested solo in comparative political analysis in political science. This system does not rely on human judgement on the part of the researchers, and can be thus considered to be “objective”, short of possible sampling or selection bias. It is replicable. If provided, the same dataset and algorithm used, same conclusions should be reached by any scientist. This result was achieved by creating a text corpus from news items and press releases extracted from the websites of Croatian political parties currently represented in the Parliament. Available and collected data consist of public announcements mainly from IDS (Istarski Demokratski Sabor / Istrian Democratic Assambly), SDSS (Samostalna Demokratska Srpska Stranka / Independed Democratic Serb Party) and HSLS (Hrvatska Socijalno Liberalna Stranka / Croatian Social Liberal Party). Data analyzed suggests three dominant phrases of the research process. All political parties had similar political stand towards pointed out issues. Three most significant phrases were determined. First phrase is related to words “Demography” and “Reduction” and finding suggest that most analyzed articles relates towards migration of Croatian citizens in connection to economic hardships of some kind. Phrase two is related to words “Border” and “Croatia-Serbia” which strongly indicates relation to migration and is related towards inter-Balkan migration, mostly connected with consequences of the Croatian War of Independence from 1990’s, and is of most interest to SDSS, a Serb minority party in Croatia. Phrase three is related towards Marrakesh Agreement (Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration), where most of analyzed data shows that parties have a constructive but ambivalent stance towards migration from the third countries. Research conducted on available data, shows that wide spread international migration is not in the focus of most Croatian political parties, while topics and interest for inter-Balkan and Croatian economic/political migration dominates Croatian political spectre