Gennadii Iakovlev | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Detecting Authorship in Political Texts with Inductive Stylometry

Political texts are rarely authored by the nominal speaker alone. Tweets, speeches, reports, and official statements are drafted, edited, or harmonized by staff, yet political science has paid limited attention to the stylistic traces these hidden authors leave behind. This paper develops and stress-tests an inductive stylometric approach for recovering latent authorship structure in political communication, combining character 3-gram features with UMAP dimensionality reduction, and Burrows' Delta. We apply the approach to six corpora that vary in length (from tweets to long documents), in mode (written and oral), and in language (English and Hungarian). The approach recovers near-disjoint analyst fingerprints in formal legal prose in both languages, sorts a politician's tweets into validated subsets while uncovering additional insights, and distinguishes scripted from improvised speech. It fails, however, to resolve individual speechwriters within scripted corpora. Frequency-based stylometry is thus a powerful tool that, depending on authorial signal strength and institutional editing, can uncover authorship traces relevant to legislative studies, political communication, and policy research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Elite Polarization in European Parliamentary Speeches: a Novel Measurement Approach Using Large Language Models

Theories of democratic stability, populism, and party-system crisis often point to a form of polarization that comparative research rarely measures directly: hostile relations among political elites. Existing comparative measures capture adjacent phenomena, including mass affective polarization, or elite ideological distance, but not directed mutual elite evaluation. This paper introduces the Elite Polarization Score, a measurement of out-party evaluations in parliamentary speech. Large Language Models identify political actors mentioned in parliamentary debates, recover speaker-target pairs, estimate the sentiment directed at each actor, standardize heterogeneous references into party dyads, and aggregate these evaluations into party- and parliament-level measures of mutual out-party negativity. The validity of the approach is demonstrated on parliamentary corpora from the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Italy, covering up to four decades of debate. The resulting measure is conceptually distinct from mass affective polarization, elite ideological polarization, incivility, negative campaigning, and general sentiment. Evidence from the UK case study shows that it is also empirically distinct from mass affective polarization, elite ideological polarization, and incivility. Extreme negative evaluations can also be used to locate pernicious polarization rhetoric. Validation across three countries finds no false discoveries, sentiment estimates accurate to roughly 10 percent of the scale range, and AI sensitivity that meets or exceeds that of human coders in two of three settings. Because the algorithm is multilingual, requires no task-specific training, and can be aggregated by party and quarter, it provides a scalable basis for future cross-national research on what produces elite polarization and what elite polarization itself produces

cs.CL↗