Michal Mochtak
Biographic Data
| ID | 1494592 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michal Mochtak |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michal |
| FAMILY NAME | Mochtak |
| SIGNATURE | MOCHTAK M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Luxembourg |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5598-5642 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 57 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Parlasent: Mapping sentiment in political discourse with large language models
Contains fulltext : 320069.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)
Chasing the authoritarian spectre: Detecting authoritarian discourse with large language models
The paper introduces a deep‐learning model fine‐tuned for detecting authoritarian discourse in political speeches. Set up as a regression problem with weak supervision logic, the model is trained for the task of classification of segments of text for being/not being associated with authoritarian discourse. Rather than trying to define what an authoritarian discourse is, the model builds on the assumption that authoritarian leaders inherently defi…
Authoritarianism rising as polls loom: The Authoritarian Election Countdown Effect
Contains fulltext : 322679.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access
Diffusion of Influence? Detecting China’s Footprint in Foreign Policies of Other Countries
The Abyss of Ethnic Division: Two Decades of Discussing War in the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina
The article analyses over two decades of parliamentary debates in Bosnia–Herzegovina in order to understand the role of war past in the political reconciliation of Bosnian elites. We show that the discourse of war identified in the Parliament of Bosnia–Herzegovina structurally differs from the mainstream notion of Bosnian politics. The patterns detected in the parliamentary debates indicate that the central conflict exists primarily alongside Bos…
Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories in Southeast Europe: (Non-)Believers, Social Network Bubbles, and the Discourse of Blame
n Contains fulltext :\n 301273.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)\n
Prewar Public Discourse: Letters to Politika , Belgrade, 1988–1991
We studied prewar public discourse by analysing the origin, content and sentiment of more than 4, 000 letters written by people from all walks of life and published in the Belgrade broadsheet Politika loyal to the regime of Slobodan Milošević during the three years directly preceding the Yugoslav wars. Our analysis combined lexicon-based tools of automated topic and sentiment analysis with data on the sociodemographic characteristics of the lette…
Contesting war memories: Parties and voters in contemporary Southeast Europe
Over the past four decades, there has been a proliferation of interest in the causes, consequences, and dynamics of contestation over collective memories across a variety of fields. Unfortunately, collective memories—particularly those of traumatic experiences of violence such as wars and revolutions—have been largely absent from party politics research. Using data collected in an expert survey on the policy positions and ideological orientations…
Bias in the eye of beholder? 25 years of election monitoring in Europe
Building on the original corpus of OSCE monitoring reports, the article analyses quarter of century of election monitoring in Europe and assesses the congruence of OSCE written assessments with expert views. We show that, overall, the OSCE monitoring reports are highly correlated and congruent with expert assessments. More importantly, the level of congruence between the two increases with time. However, we also identify various forms of biases r…
Talking War: Representation, Veterans and Ideology in Post-War Parliamentary Debates
How do politicians in post-war societies talk about the past war? How do they discursively represent vulnerable social groups created by the conflict? Does the nature of this representation depend on the politicians’ ideology or their record of combat service? We answer these questions by pairing natural language processing tools and a large corpus of parliamentary debates with an extensive data set of biographical information including detailed …
Ethnic Bias after Ethnic Conflict: Preferential Voting and the Serb Minority in Croatian Elections
In spite of growing interest in democratization and electoral competition after ethnic conflict, we know little about the impact of ethnic violence on voter choice in post-conflict societies. This article uses an original dataset of local-level electoral results, communities' exposure to war violence, and candidates' ethnicity derived from names in contemporary Croatia to uncover the relationship between local post-conflict ethnic distribution, e…
Studying Chinese Foreign Policy Narratives: Introducing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Press Conferences Corpus
The paper presents an original corpus of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conferences. The dataset is a unique source of information on official positions and diplomatic narratives of China mapping almost two decades of its foreign policy discourse. The corpus contains almost 23,000 question – answer dyads from 2002 to 2020 ready to be used for analytical purposes. We argue the dataset is an important contribution to the scholarship …
Coronavirus Pandemic Response and Voter Choice
Does the public perception of governments’ coronavirus pandemic responses actually make a difference to their electoral fortunes? In this research note, we answer that question by presenting the preliminary results of a survey of more than 3,000 voters in Croatia and Serbia conducted on a dedicated mobile app and web platform directly preceding parliamentary elections that took place in these two countries during the summer of 2020. This survey w…
Health versus Wealth during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Efforts to combat the COVID-19 crisis were characterized by a difficult trade-off: the stringency of the lockdowns decreased the spread of the virus, but amplified the damage to the economy. In this study, we analyze public attitude toward this trade-off using a survey-embedded experiment conducted with a quota sample of more than 7,000 respondents from Southeast Europe, collected in April and May 2020. The results show that public opinion genera…
Voting and winning: Perceptions of Electoral Integrity in Consolidating Democracies
peer reviewed
Mythologizing war: Legacies of conflict in Croatian parliamentary debates
The paper analyses almost fifteen years of Croatian parliamentary debates and identifies a discourse of war legacies. Using the latest advancements in natural language processing, the paper utilizes models based on latent semantic analysis and discusses how politicians talk about war in terms of common narratives and shared frameworks. Using a complex vector representation of war-related concepts, the paper specifically focuses on their framing i…
Looking Eastward: Network Analysis of Czech Deputies and Their Foreign Policy Groups
This article analyzes a structure of relations among the members of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, as reported through their memberships in bilateral and multilateral groups of friendship which establish professional contacts between the Chamber of Deputies and foreign parliaments. We approach the structure as a social network of members of parliament and interpret the memberships as proxy indica…
Understanding Electoral Violence through Complex Textual Data: OSCE Monitoring Missions in Different Contexts
The article analyzes more than twenty years of evidence on electoral violence as reported by Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitoring mission reports. It identifies prevailing trends of electoral violence in the OSCE participating states in order to better understand how the phenomenon is understood and framed by the leading international monitoring organizations in the region. The analysis utilizes a unique approach …
Electoral violence under different contexts. Evidence from the Western Balkans
The paper addresses the question of what settings are empirically relevant for the occurrence of electoral violence in the region of Western Balkans and what theoretical paths may cover their logic. Electoral violence has been part of the electoral arenas in the region for decades and although it has evolved and in some cases disappeared, a number of countries still experience it. The paper analyses original data on electoral violence collected f…
Power-sharing and democratization in Africa: The Kenyan experience
A case for global democracy? Arms exports and conflicting goals in democracy promotion
Explaining Electoral Violence in Serbia: FsQCA Analysis of Contentious Behavior in the Electoral Arena
The article focuses on an analysis of incidents of electoral violence in Serbia in the period of 1990–2014. The main objective is to identify potential sources of contentious behavior in the electoral arena and, using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), to select potential causal paths that can explain it. Theoretical discussion combined with the original data collected from OSCE monitoring reports open a space for the systemati…
Fighting and voting: Mapping electoral violence in the region of post-Communist Europe
Electoral disputes accompanied by violent outbreaks have become an emerging problem in societies under transformation, in authoritarian regimes, as well as in young democracies. The truth is that many politicians elected to office, their supporters, and political activists have altered their perceptions of electoral competition in a form of zero-sum logic with direct consequences for their opponents. After the fall of Communism in the beginning o…
Democratization and electoral violence in post-communism. A study of Montenegro
Taking as its starting point the existing theoretical debate on electoral violence, this paper analyses election-related violence in Montenegro in the country’s post-communist era. The objective is to gather data concerning violence tied to national elections for president and parliament, and to identify patterns present in the data. The role played by electoral violence in Montenegro during the period of democratization is subsequently evaluated…
Voting and winning: Perceptions of Electoral Integrity in Consolidating Democracies
peer reviewed
Contesting war memories: Parties and voters in contemporary Southeast Europe
Over the past four decades, there has been a proliferation of interest in the causes, consequences, and dynamics of contestation over collective memories across a variety of fields. Unfortunately, collective memories—particularly those of traumatic experiences of violence such as wars and revolutions—have been largely absent from party politics research. Using data collected in an expert survey on the policy positions and ideological orientations…
Talking War: Representation, Veterans and Ideology in Post-War Parliamentary Debates
How do politicians in post-war societies talk about the past war? How do they discursively represent vulnerable social groups created by the conflict? Does the nature of this representation depend on the politicians’ ideology or their record of combat service? We answer these questions by pairing natural language processing tools and a large corpus of parliamentary debates with an extensive data set of biographical information including detailed …
Health versus Wealth during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Efforts to combat the COVID-19 crisis were characterized by a difficult trade-off: the stringency of the lockdowns decreased the spread of the virus, but amplified the damage to the economy. In this study, we analyze public attitude toward this trade-off using a survey-embedded experiment conducted with a quota sample of more than 7,000 respondents from Southeast Europe, collected in April and May 2020. The results show that public opinion genera…
Fighting and voting: Mapping electoral violence in the region of post-Communist Europe
Electoral disputes accompanied by violent outbreaks have become an emerging problem in societies under transformation, in authoritarian regimes, as well as in young democracies. The truth is that many politicians elected to office, their supporters, and political activists have altered their perceptions of electoral competition in a form of zero-sum logic with direct consequences for their opponents. After the fall of Communism in the beginning o…
Diffusion of Influence? Detecting China’s Footprint in Foreign Policies of Other Countries
Ethnic Bias after Ethnic Conflict: Preferential Voting and the Serb Minority in Croatian Elections
In spite of growing interest in democratization and electoral competition after ethnic conflict, we know little about the impact of ethnic violence on voter choice in post-conflict societies. This article uses an original dataset of local-level electoral results, communities' exposure to war violence, and candidates' ethnicity derived from names in contemporary Croatia to uncover the relationship between local post-conflict ethnic distribution, e…
Chasing the authoritarian spectre: Detecting authoritarian discourse with large language models
The paper introduces a deep‐learning model fine‐tuned for detecting authoritarian discourse in political speeches. Set up as a regression problem with weak supervision logic, the model is trained for the task of classification of segments of text for being/not being associated with authoritarian discourse. Rather than trying to define what an authoritarian discourse is, the model builds on the assumption that authoritarian leaders inherently defi…
Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories in Southeast Europe: (Non-)Believers, Social Network Bubbles, and the Discourse of Blame
n Contains fulltext :\n 301273.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)\n
Studying Chinese Foreign Policy Narratives: Introducing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Press Conferences Corpus
The paper presents an original corpus of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conferences. The dataset is a unique source of information on official positions and diplomatic narratives of China mapping almost two decades of its foreign policy discourse. The corpus contains almost 23,000 question – answer dyads from 2002 to 2020 ready to be used for analytical purposes. We argue the dataset is an important contribution to the scholarship …
Coronavirus Pandemic Response and Voter Choice
Does the public perception of governments’ coronavirus pandemic responses actually make a difference to their electoral fortunes? In this research note, we answer that question by presenting the preliminary results of a survey of more than 3,000 voters in Croatia and Serbia conducted on a dedicated mobile app and web platform directly preceding parliamentary elections that took place in these two countries during the summer of 2020. This survey w…
Looking Eastward: Network Analysis of Czech Deputies and Their Foreign Policy Groups
This article analyzes a structure of relations among the members of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, as reported through their memberships in bilateral and multilateral groups of friendship which establish professional contacts between the Chamber of Deputies and foreign parliaments. We approach the structure as a social network of members of parliament and interpret the memberships as proxy indica…
A case for global democracy? Arms exports and conflicting goals in democracy promotion
Democratization and electoral violence in post-communism. A study of Montenegro
Taking as its starting point the existing theoretical debate on electoral violence, this paper analyses election-related violence in Montenegro in the country’s post-communist era. The objective is to gather data concerning violence tied to national elections for president and parliament, and to identify patterns present in the data. The role played by electoral violence in Montenegro during the period of democratization is subsequently evaluated…
Explaining Electoral Violence in Serbia: FsQCA Analysis of Contentious Behavior in the Electoral Arena
The article focuses on an analysis of incidents of electoral violence in Serbia in the period of 1990–2014. The main objective is to identify potential sources of contentious behavior in the electoral arena and, using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), to select potential causal paths that can explain it. Theoretical discussion combined with the original data collected from OSCE monitoring reports open a space for the systemati…
Fighting and voting: Mapping electoral violence in the region of post-Communist Europe
Electoral disputes accompanied by violent outbreaks have become an emerging problem in societies under transformation, in authoritarian regimes, as well as in young democracies. The truth is that many politicians elected to office, their supporters, and political activists have altered their perceptions of electoral competition in a form of zero-sum logic with direct consequences for their opponents. After the fall of Communism in the beginning o…
A case for global democracy? Arms exports and conflicting goals in democracy promotion
Power-sharing and democratization in Africa: The Kenyan experience
Looking Eastward: Network Analysis of Czech Deputies and Their Foreign Policy Groups
This article analyzes a structure of relations among the members of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, as reported through their memberships in bilateral and multilateral groups of friendship which establish professional contacts between the Chamber of Deputies and foreign parliaments. We approach the structure as a social network of members of parliament and interpret the memberships as proxy indica…
Understanding Electoral Violence through Complex Textual Data: OSCE Monitoring Missions in Different Contexts
The article analyzes more than twenty years of evidence on electoral violence as reported by Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitoring mission reports. It identifies prevailing trends of electoral violence in the OSCE participating states in order to better understand how the phenomenon is understood and framed by the leading international monitoring organizations in the region. The analysis utilizes a unique approach …
Electoral violence under different contexts. Evidence from the Western Balkans
The paper addresses the question of what settings are empirically relevant for the occurrence of electoral violence in the region of Western Balkans and what theoretical paths may cover their logic. Electoral violence has been part of the electoral arenas in the region for decades and although it has evolved and in some cases disappeared, a number of countries still experience it. The paper analyses original data on electoral violence collected f…
Mythologizing war: Legacies of conflict in Croatian parliamentary debates
The paper analyses almost fifteen years of Croatian parliamentary debates and identifies a discourse of war legacies. Using the latest advancements in natural language processing, the paper utilizes models based on latent semantic analysis and discusses how politicians talk about war in terms of common narratives and shared frameworks. Using a complex vector representation of war-related concepts, the paper specifically focuses on their framing i…
Ethnic Bias after Ethnic Conflict: Preferential Voting and the Serb Minority in Croatian Elections
In spite of growing interest in democratization and electoral competition after ethnic conflict, we know little about the impact of ethnic violence on voter choice in post-conflict societies. This article uses an original dataset of local-level electoral results, communities' exposure to war violence, and candidates' ethnicity derived from names in contemporary Croatia to uncover the relationship between local post-conflict ethnic distribution, e…
Studying Chinese Foreign Policy Narratives: Introducing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Press Conferences Corpus
The paper presents an original corpus of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conferences. The dataset is a unique source of information on official positions and diplomatic narratives of China mapping almost two decades of its foreign policy discourse. The corpus contains almost 23,000 question – answer dyads from 2002 to 2020 ready to be used for analytical purposes. We argue the dataset is an important contribution to the scholarship …
Coronavirus Pandemic Response and Voter Choice
Does the public perception of governments’ coronavirus pandemic responses actually make a difference to their electoral fortunes? In this research note, we answer that question by presenting the preliminary results of a survey of more than 3,000 voters in Croatia and Serbia conducted on a dedicated mobile app and web platform directly preceding parliamentary elections that took place in these two countries during the summer of 2020. This survey w…
Health versus Wealth during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Efforts to combat the COVID-19 crisis were characterized by a difficult trade-off: the stringency of the lockdowns decreased the spread of the virus, but amplified the damage to the economy. In this study, we analyze public attitude toward this trade-off using a survey-embedded experiment conducted with a quota sample of more than 7,000 respondents from Southeast Europe, collected in April and May 2020. The results show that public opinion genera…
Voting and winning: Perceptions of Electoral Integrity in Consolidating Democracies
peer reviewed
Diffusion of Influence? Detecting China’s Footprint in Foreign Policies of Other Countries
The Abyss of Ethnic Division: Two Decades of Discussing War in the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina
The article analyses over two decades of parliamentary debates in Bosnia–Herzegovina in order to understand the role of war past in the political reconciliation of Bosnian elites. We show that the discourse of war identified in the Parliament of Bosnia–Herzegovina structurally differs from the mainstream notion of Bosnian politics. The patterns detected in the parliamentary debates indicate that the central conflict exists primarily alongside Bos…
Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories in Southeast Europe: (Non-)Believers, Social Network Bubbles, and the Discourse of Blame
n Contains fulltext :\n 301273.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)\n
Prewar Public Discourse: Letters to Politika , Belgrade, 1988–1991
We studied prewar public discourse by analysing the origin, content and sentiment of more than 4, 000 letters written by people from all walks of life and published in the Belgrade broadsheet Politika loyal to the regime of Slobodan Milošević during the three years directly preceding the Yugoslav wars. Our analysis combined lexicon-based tools of automated topic and sentiment analysis with data on the sociodemographic characteristics of the lette…
Contesting war memories: Parties and voters in contemporary Southeast Europe
Over the past four decades, there has been a proliferation of interest in the causes, consequences, and dynamics of contestation over collective memories across a variety of fields. Unfortunately, collective memories—particularly those of traumatic experiences of violence such as wars and revolutions—have been largely absent from party politics research. Using data collected in an expert survey on the policy positions and ideological orientations…
Bias in the eye of beholder? 25 years of election monitoring in Europe
Building on the original corpus of OSCE monitoring reports, the article analyses quarter of century of election monitoring in Europe and assesses the congruence of OSCE written assessments with expert views. We show that, overall, the OSCE monitoring reports are highly correlated and congruent with expert assessments. More importantly, the level of congruence between the two increases with time. However, we also identify various forms of biases r…
Talking War: Representation, Veterans and Ideology in Post-War Parliamentary Debates
How do politicians in post-war societies talk about the past war? How do they discursively represent vulnerable social groups created by the conflict? Does the nature of this representation depend on the politicians’ ideology or their record of combat service? We answer these questions by pairing natural language processing tools and a large corpus of parliamentary debates with an extensive data set of biographical information including detailed …
Parlasent: Mapping sentiment in political discourse with large language models
Contains fulltext : 320069.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)
Chasing the authoritarian spectre: Detecting authoritarian discourse with large language models
The paper introduces a deep‐learning model fine‐tuned for detecting authoritarian discourse in political speeches. Set up as a regression problem with weak supervision logic, the model is trained for the task of classification of segments of text for being/not being associated with authoritarian discourse. Rather than trying to define what an authoritarian discourse is, the model builds on the assumption that authoritarian leaders inherently defi…
Authoritarianism rising as polls loom: The Authoritarian Election Countdown Effect
Contains fulltext : 322679.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access
Political science (24 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (11 works) · Democracy (9 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (8 works) · Economics (6 works)