Political Ideology and Polarization of Policy Positions: A Multi-dimensional Approach

Analyzing political ideology and polarization is of critical importance in advancing our understanding of the political context in society. Recent research has made great strides towards understanding the ideological bias (i.e., stance) of news media along a left-right spectrum. In this work, we take a novel approach and study the ideology of the policy under discussion teasing apart the nuanced co-existence of stance and ideology. Aligned with the theoretical accounts in political science, we treat ideology as a multi-dimensional construct, and introduce the first diachronic dataset of news articles whose political ideology under discussion is annotated by trained political scientists and linguists at the paragraph-level. We showcase that this framework enables quantitative analysis of polarization, a temporal, multifaceted measure of ideological distance. We further present baseline models for ideology prediction.