2026-10-11T13:18:19Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/34050204 2026-10-01T18:14:05Z category_21 category_39 category_734 category_106 portal_87 item_type_6 month_year_10_2026

Attributes, abstractions, and combinations: a new taxonomy for studying how parties invoke social groups Hauke Licht (25158201) Leonce Röth (4670356) Biotechnology Ecology Biological Sciences not elsewhere classified Science Policy Social groups social attributes computational text analysis political behaviour <p>Research increasingly examines which social groups political actors refer to. Yet, existing approaches typically inherit classifications shaped by demand-side perspectives or conflate how groups are defined with how they are framed. We propose a novel, attribute-centred taxonomy of social group references that classifies groups by the attributes political actors invoke, organises these attributes along nested levels of abstraction, and captures attribute combinations when multiple attributes are invoked within a single reference. To demonstrate the analytical value of our taxonomy, we collect original annotations and develop automated classification methods to quantify the group focus strategies of parties in 36 countries over more than 50 years. Our application underscores that socio-structural, constructivist, and deservingness perspectives on party competition primarily operate at different – though overlapping – analytical levels, and yields substantive insights into how different party families construct and mobilise social groups. Our taxonomy, data, and pre-trained classifiers contribute new resources to facilitate future research on social group references in political discourse.</p> 2026-10-01T18:14:05Z Text Journal contribution 10.6084/m9.figshare.34050204.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Attributes_abstractions_and_combinations_a_new_taxonomy_for_studying_how_parties_invoke_social_groups/34050204 CC BY 4.0