Videos by Erdem Yörük
The Global Welfare Dataset (GLOW) (glow.ku.edu.tr) is a cross-national panel dataset that aims at... more The Global Welfare Dataset (GLOW) (glow.ku.edu.tr) is a cross-national panel dataset that aims at facilitating comparative social policy research on the Global North and Global South. GLOW is an outcome of a comparative welfare politics research project, "Emerging Welfare," funded by the European Research Council (emw.ku.edu.tr) and based in Koç University in Istanbul.
The GLOW dataset includes 381 variables on 61 countries from the years between 1989 and 2015. It covers comparable panel data on both Global North and South as we have compiled data from a large number of international and domestic sources, conducted compatibility checks, and standardized the data. GLOW provides comparable cross-national data on social assistance, as we applied the same methodology of the World Bank's ASPIRE dataset in order to build comparable indicators across developed and developing countries. 51 views
What is the relationship between social movements and welfare policies? How and when do governmen... more What is the relationship between social movements and welfare policies? How and when do governments expand welfare programs to contain social unrest? How do we understand that a welfare policy has become a tool of political containment, as opposed to a tool of improving people's lives? When do social movements bring unintended consequences in the form of social policies for which they do not even struggle? By analyzing the case of emerging market economies, and using computational, quantitative and qualitative methods, the Emerging Welfare ERC Project shows that emerging markets, including Argentina, Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and Turkey are forming a new welfare regime, the Populist Welfare State Regime principally as a response to the growing political power of the poor as a source of grassroots threat for governments. 80 views
Books by Erdem Yörük
University of Michigan Press (Open Access), 2022
In The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey, author Erdem Yörük provides a politics-based expl... more In The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey, author Erdem Yörük provides a politics-based explanation for the post-1980 transformation of the Turkish welfare system, in which poor relief policies have replaced employment-based social security. This book is one of the results of Yörük’s European Research Council-funded project, which compares the political dynamics in several emerging markets in order to develop a new political theory of welfare in the global south. As such, this book is an ambitious analytical and empirical contribution to understanding the causes of a sweeping shift in the nature of state welfare provision in Turkey during the recent decades—part of a global trend that extends far beyond Turkey. Most scholarship about Turkey and similar countries has explained this shift toward poor relief as a response to demographic and structural changes including aging populations, the decline in the economic weight of industry, and the informalization of labor, while ignoring the effect of grassroots politics. In order to overcome these theoretical shortages in the literature, the book revisits concepts of political containment and political mobilization from the earlier literature on the mid-twentieth-century welfare state development and incorporates the effects of grassroots politics in order to understand the recent welfare system shift as it materialized in Turkey, where a new matrix of political dynamics has produced new large-scale social assistance programs.
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Academic Writings by Erdem Yörük
The Developing Economies, 2024
Using artificial intelligence, this article explores the intricate dynamics between ideologies, e... more Using artificial intelligence, this article explores the intricate dynamics between ideologies, emotions, and political preferences of the electorate in Turkey. Utilizing a dataset of one billion posts from X (formerly Twitter), the study maps out political opinions, focusing on support for presidential candidates, ideological stances, and collective emotions around the pivotal 2023 Turkish presidential elections. We discuss the limitations of conventional survey techniques and introduce an ERC-funded Politus project that processes digital trace data to offer timely insights into social and political trends. The study's findings, particularly around the "prayer rug (seccade) crisis," underscore the complexity of electoral politics and the potential of digital trace data in capturing the evolving sentiments and ideological orientations of voters. Through this computational approach, the research provides a granular depiction of Turkey's ideological map and electoral behavior, contributing significantly to the discourse on political analysis in the digital era.
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Why do some developing countries develop generous welfare state regimes (WSR), while others do no... more Why do some developing countries develop generous welfare state regimes (WSR), while others do not? Which factors lead to varieties in welfare regimes in developing countries? We explain the development of different welfare state regimes (WSR) in the Global South based on the findings of WSR classification. We conduct inductive typological theory on the basis of the structure-institution-agency (SIA) framework and use positive and negative cases selected through a Most-Different-Systems-Design. Our analysis shows that a developing country that satisfies three necessary but insufficient conditions (1. having implemented a prolonged ISI period, 2. having experienced organized contentious politics of the poor, and 3. having developed adequate state capacity) is anticipated to have developed a Populist Welfare State Regime that is more generous and extensive than other welfare state regimes in the Global South. This article contributes to the long-standing debates of Southern WSRs by taking a nuanced and interactive approach that considers the interactions among structures, institutions, and political agency.
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Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice , 2022
Social assistance programs and the related literature are proliferating globally. This article co... more Social assistance programs and the related literature are proliferating globally. This article conducts a critical systematic review of the literature with objective and transparent selection criteria and illustrates two major shortcomings: First, the literature is largely descriptive and impact-oriented as analytical studies on the determinants/causes of social assistance programs are relatively under-examined. Second, it identifies a gap in the literature, which emanates from the relative under-examination of political, and especially contentious political, factors in scholarly analyses of determinants/causes of social assistance programs in comparison to structuralist, institutional, and ideational approaches.
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What are the contentious political dynamics of the largest workfare program in the world, the Mah... more What are the contentious political dynamics of the largest workfare program in the world, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) of India? Combining quantitative analysis with a close reading of government documents and a survey of the existing literature, we suggest that the Indian government's counter-insurgency strategy against the Maoist unrest is a significant dynamic shaping the distribution of MGNREGA benefits. In our empirical analysis, we examine the effect of Maoist incidents on household income due to MGNREGA by merging a nationally representative household survey (Indian Human Development Survey-II) and a Maoist incidents dataset. Controlling for relevant household and district characteristics, we show that higher intensity of violent conflicts is associated with higher MGNREGA benefits. This result is robust to using a variety of alternative specifications and estimation methodologies.
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Frontiers in Sociology, 2022
What are the contemporary determinates of social assistance provision? What is the role of conten... more What are the contemporary determinates of social assistance provision? What is the role of contentious politics? Social assistance literature is dominated by economic and demographic accounts, which under-examine the possibility that governments extend social assistance to contain social unrest. We test factors associated with these "structuralist" and "political" theories on a new panel dataset which includes OECD and emerging market countries between and. The results indicate social assistance coverage has a significant positive relationship with riots. We explain this outcome as policymakers expanding social assistance as a means of containing violent civil unrest. This e ect is more significant in emerging markets, suggesting that the domination of structural explanations is a result of sample bias toward the OECD. Finally, we find that governments consider World Bank social policy recommendations only insofar as there is violent unrest.
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Global Contentious Politics Database (GLOCON) Annotation Manuals, 2022
Emerging Markets Welfare project investigates the effects of contentious politics on welfare sta... more Emerging Markets Welfare project investigates the effects of contentious politics on welfare state programs in countries of the Global South. It hypothesizes that government response to social contention is a significant factor that shapes welfare policies. It is in this respect that mapping the dynamics of social contention in a given country becomes crucial, and duly constitutes a fundamental component of the entire project. Investigating the causal relationship between social contention and government policy involves more than a simple correlation, particularly if the focus is on specific government action, namely welfare policies. The map of social contention adequate for such an understanding should thus go beyond laying out basic trends of ebbing and flowing of social contention over space and time and provide insight into particularities such as the types of action repertoires, levels of violence, characteristics of actors or social groups that engage in contentious politics, the characteristics of the demands that they raise.
The purpose of the second work package of the EMW Project is to draw the aforementioned map of social contention. For achieving this purpose, we created a database of contentious politics events through the extraction of information from the news reports that are featured in the most prominent online sources each focus country has to offer. The Global Contentious Politics Database (GLOCON) records contentious politics events (referred to as protest events for the sake of brevity) that take place within the borders of our focus countries with all the information available in the source about the events’ time and place, actor, type, demands raised, violence level. As of the moment, the GLOCON database contains protest event data from India, China, South Africa, Argentina, and Brazil. It features data in three languages: English for India, China, and South Africa data, Spanish for Argentina data, and Portuguese for Brazil data. The database was created in a way that is able to accommodate additions of other focus countries and/or news sources in the future.
The database creation utilized automated text processing tools that detects if a news article contains a protest event, locate protest information within the article, and extract pieces of information regarding the detected protest events. The basis of training and testing the automated tools is the GLOCON Gold Standard Corpus (GSC), which contains news articles from multiple sources from each focus country. The articles in the GSC were manually coded by skilled annotators in both classification and extraction tasks with the utmost accuracy and consistency that automated tool development demands. In order to assure these, the annotation manuals in this document lay out the rules according to which annotators code the news articles. Annotators refer to the manuals at all times for all annotation tasks and apply the rules that they contain.
Despite the EMW Project's focus on the countries of the Global South, and the initial choice of a limited number of countries to be featured in the GSC, none of the rules or principles contained in this manual is more or less applicable to certain countries, sources or periods than others. The GLOCON database aims to be inclusive and capable of expanding. Securing consistency, reliability, and validity of data in the face of temporal and spatial expansion requires that annotation principles are generally applicable and that they are applied consistently.
The annotation process is composed of three main levels for each news report document. The document-level annotation determines the news articles that contain information on actual (past or ongoing) protest events. The sentence-level annotation aims to locate sentences that contain protest event-related information. In the final phase, words or phrases that give concrete information about protest events are detected.
Corresponding to the document and sentence classification, and information extraction tasks, there are three main and two supplemental manuals which together cover the entire annotation process from the document, through the sentence, to the token level. The first manual is the Document Level Protest Annotation Manual (DOLPAM) which establishes the rules for determining news articles that contain protest events; in other words, classifying news articles into those which contain protest events and those which do not. It lays out the protest event ontology, that is, the protest event definition which specifies the range of contentious politics events that are included in the scope of the project. It introduces and exemplifies different types of protest events, and defines the criteria to which a news report must conform to be labeled as a protest event article. The following Sentence Level Protest Annotation Manual (SELPAM) carries on with classifying the sentences in the documents that have already been classified as protest event articles. Similarly, it defines and exemplifies event sentences and enumerates the rules by which sentences are labeled as event sentences and non-event sentences. The third and final main manual is the Token Level Protest Annotation Manual (TOLPAM) which is the longest and most detailed of the three main level manuals. It defines the types of event-related information that the project aims at collecting from news articles and explains how expressions within the event sentences which contain these pieces of information are tagged. The remaining two manuals are supplemental manuals that label further information about the events that are already extracted in the three main levels of annotation. Both define annotation tasks that are performed on the document level. The first is the Violent Protest Events Annotation Manual which lays out the rules for classifying news reports that contain protest events into categories of violent and non-violent. The following, Protest Event Demands Annotation Manual aims at setting the rules for labeling the demands and/or grievances associated with the protest events that are extracted in the news articles. More detailed information about each manual can be found under their respective headings.
Even though every particular level of annotation has its respective annotation manual, the whole process must be thought of as an integrated whole as each level of annotation is premised on the results of the previous level. Hence, familiarizing oneself with all the manuals before starting annotation on any single level is recommended. Knowing in advance what the sentence and token level annotation tasks entail would help an annotator working on the document level considerably. That said, it is neither practical nor advisable to try to learn all annotation procedures by heart. Memory is prone to mislead, and recurrent reference to the manuals is the preferred way of utilizing them. Thus, annotators must read the entire manual before starting annotation, and remember to refer to it when there is the slightest doubt about a rule or a difficult case.
The content of the annotation manual is built on the general principles and standards of linguistic annotation laid out in other prominent annotation manuals such as ACE, CAMEO, and TimeML. These principles, however, have been adapted or rather modified heavily to accommodate the social scientific concepts and variables employed in the EMW project. The manual has been molded throughout a long trial and error process that accompanied the annotation of the GSC. It owes much of its current shape to the meticulous work and invaluable feedback provided by highly specialized teams of annotators, whose diligence and expertise greatly increased the quality of the corpus.
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What welfare state regimes are observed when the analysis is extended globally, empirically and t... more What welfare state regimes are observed when the analysis is extended globally, empirically and theoretically? We introduce a novel perspective into the 'welfare state regimes analyses'a perspective that brings developed and developing countries together and, as such, broadens the geographical, empirical and theoretical scope of the 'welfare modelling business'. The expanding welfare regimes literature has suffered from several drawbacks: (i) it is radically slanted towards organisation for economic cooperation and development (OECD) countries, (ii) the literature on non-OECD countries does not use genuine welfare policy variables and (iii) social assistance and healthcare programmes are not utilized as components of welfare state effort and generosity. To overcome these limitations, we employ advanced data reduction methods, exploit an original dataset (https://glow.ku.edu.tr/) that we assembled from several international and domestic sources covering 52 emerging markets and OECD countries and present a welfare state regime structure as of the mid-2010s. Our analysis is based on genuine welfare policy variables that are theorized to capture welfare generosity and welfare efforts across five major policy domains: old-age pensions, sickness cash benefits, unemployment insurance, social assistance and healthcare. The sample of OECD countries and emerging market economies form four distinct welfare state regime clusters: institutional, neoliberal, populist and residual. We unveil the composition and performance of welfare state components in each welfare state regime family and develop politics-based working hypotheses about the formation of these regimes. Institutional welfare state regimes perform high in social security, healthcare and social assistance, while
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Course Description: This course provides an applied, non-technical introduction to the methods an... more Course Description: This course provides an applied, non-technical introduction to the methods and ideas of Computational Social Sciences. It discusses how new online data sources and the computational methods shed new light on old social science questions and ask brand new questions. It articulates on some of the ethical and privacy challenges of living in a world of big data and algorithmic decision making.
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American Behavioral Scientist, 2021
What is the most optimal way of creating a gold standard corpus for training a machine learning s... more What is the most optimal way of creating a gold standard corpus for training a machine learning system that is designed for automatically collecting protest information in a crosscountry context? We show that creating a gold standard corpus for training and testing machine learning models on the basis of randomly chosen news articles from news archives yields better performance than selecting news articles on the basis of keyword filtering, which is the most prevalent method currently used in automated event coding. We advance this new bottom-up approach to ensure generalizability and reliability in crosscountry comparative protest event collection from international and local news in different countries, languages, sources and time periods, which entails a large variety of event types, actors, and targets. We present the results of comparing our random-sample approach with keyword filtering. We show that the machine learning algorithms, and particularly state-of-the-art deep learning tools, perform much better when they are trained with the gold standard corpus from a randomly selected set of news articles from China, India, and South Africa. Finally, we also present our approach to overcome the major ethical issues that are intrinsic to protest event coding.
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SOCI 321 Koç University, 2021
This course is designed to introduce students to the sociological study of social movements in a ... more This course is designed to introduce students to the sociological study of social movements in a historical and comparative perspective. By focusing on some of the key theories that explain the origins, tactics, and success of social movements, the course examines how political, ideological, economic, organizational, and cultural factors shape social movement emergence and development as well as the diverse ways in which social movements affect political and social change. Course Organization and Requirements Lectures: Lectures will not only focus and clarify material in the readings but also provide additional information. Students are expected to do the readings before each class and are required to be informed about both the reading material content and in-class lectures and discussions. Exams: There will be one mid-term and one final exam. For your midterm exam, you are asked to write down a research proposal on a topic that you would like to examine during the semester. For your final exam, you are asked to write down a 10-page research paper on the topic that you will have examined during the semester. Protest Event Collection Research: You will be conducting protest event collection and you will receive grades for your assignments. Grading: The final grade will be computed as follows: • Research 10 % • Mid-term 40 % • Final 50 % In-class participation: Your participation in class discussions will be taken into account during final grading. Announcements in class: Students are responsible for all announcements made in classes even if they are absent that day.
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CLEF 2019 | Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, 2019
We present an overview of the CLEF-2019 Lab ProtestNews on Extracting Protests from News in the c... more We present an overview of the CLEF-2019 Lab ProtestNews on Extracting Protests from News in the context of generalizable natural language processing. The lab consists of document, sentence, and token level information classification and extraction tasks that were referred as task 1, task 2, and task 3 respectively in the scope of this lab. The tasks required the participants to identify protest relevant information from English local news at one or more aforementioned levels in a cross-context setting, which is crosscountry in the scope of this lab. The training and development data were collected from India and test data was collected from India and China. The lab attracted 58 teams to participate in the lab. 12 and 9 of these teams submitted results and working notes respectively. We have observed neural networks yield the best results and the performance drops significantly for majority of the submissions in the crosscountry setting, which is China.
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LREC Language Resources and Evaluation, 2020
We describe our effort on automated extraction of socio-political events from news in the scope o... more We describe our effort on automated extraction of socio-political events from news in the scope of a workshop and a shared task we organized at Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2020). We believe the event extraction studies in computational linguistics and social and political sciences should further support each other in order to enable large scale socio-political event information collection across sources, countries, and languages. The event consists of regular research papers and a shared task, which is about event sentence coreference identification (ESCI), tracks. All submissions were reviewed by five members of the program committee. The workshop attracted research papers related to evaluation of machine learning methodologies, language resources, material conflict forecasting, and a shared task participation report in the scope of socio-political event information collection. It has shown us the volume and variety of both the data sources and event information collection approaches related to socio-political events and the need to fill the gap between automated text processing techniques and requirements of social and political sciences.
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Automated Knowledge Base Construction , 2020
We describe a gold standard corpus of protest events that comprise of various local and internati... more We describe a gold standard corpus of protest events that comprise of various local and international sources from various countries in English. The corpus contains document, sentence, and token level annotations. This corpus facilitates creating machine learning models that automatically classify news articles and extract protest event-related information , constructing knowledge bases which enable comparative social and political science studies. For each news source, the annotation starts on random samples of news articles and continues with samples that are drawn using active learning. Each batch of samples was annotated by two social and political scientists, adjudicated by an annotation supervisor, and was improved by identifying annotation errors semi-automatically. We found that the corpus has the variety and quality to develop and benchmark text classification and event extraction systems in a cross-context setting, which contributes to the generalizability and robustness of automated text processing systems. This corpus and the reported results will set the currently lacking common ground in automated protest event collection studies.
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COVCOR20 at WNUT-2020 Task 2, 2020
In the scope of WNUT-2020 Task 2, we devel- oped various text classification systems, using deep ... more In the scope of WNUT-2020 Task 2, we devel- oped various text classification systems, using deep learning models and one using linguisti- cally informed rules. While both of the deep learning systems outperformed the system us- ing the linguistically informed rules, we found that through the integration of (the output of) the three systems a better performance could be achieved than the standalone performance of each approach in a cross-validation setting. However, on the test data the performance of the integration was slightly lower than our best performing deep learning model. These re- sults hardly indicate any progress in line of integrating machine learning and expert rules driven systems. We expect that the release of the annotation manuals and gold labels of the test data after this workshop will shed light on these perplexing results.
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Dear Colleagues and Graduate Students,
I am writing to invite you to apply for participation in o... more Dear Colleagues and Graduate Students,
I am writing to invite you to apply for participation in online training workshops in computational social sciences (CSS) as well as spread the word in your circles. These workshops are organized by an EU-funded Twinning Action project, Social ComQuant, (see https://socialcomquant.ku.edu.tr/), in which Koç University is the coordinator of a consortium. The training will be provided by one of the Social ComQuant Project partners, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, which is located in Germany. Each of the three workshops of the Fall 2020 Semester will take two days and be open to the participation of around 20 participants. The Social ComQuant Project will cover the cost of participation for up to ten selected participants from Turkey for each workshop.
We offer the following workshops for Fall 2020 semester:
1. (Workshop #1) Using Social Media Data for Research: Potentials and Pitfalls (on November 9-10, 2020)
2. (Workshop #2) Introduction to Network Analysis with R (on November 26-27, 2020)
3. (Workshop #3) Digital Trace Data in Social Science (on December 7-8, 2020)
Social ComQuant Project partners GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany and ISI Foundation (Istituto Interscambio Scientifico) in Italy, which are leading institutions in Europe in the fields of computational and quantitative social sciences, will collaborate with Koç University for three years to promote research excellence in these domains in Turkey. For this aim, the project will organize summer schools, workshops, online trainings, and staff exchange programs. In the GESIS workshops, leading scientists from social sciences, computer science, mathematics, and physics will teach state-of-the-art CSS methods that are hallmarks of research in the field. They will provide extremely valuable training to both early-stage and senior researchers at no cost. Given the limitations caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the workshops will be held online for the Fall 2020 Semester, but future GESIS workshops will be held in Cologne, if the conditions allow. In that case, travel and accommodation will also be covered by the Social ComQuant Project.
To apply, you need to submit your CV and a (one-paged, single-space) cover letter to the project’s application page. In the cover letter you are expected to explain your previous experiences and future plans related to computational social sciences. We accept applications from both senior researchers and graduate students. The deadline for applying for the workshops of Fall 2020 is November 1, 2020, @23.59 (Turkey local time).
For the next three years, Social ComQuant will be offering a large number of training activities such as staff exchanges, summer schools, workshops and online courses. We are also planning to establish a Computational Social Sciences MA program at Koç University. If you would like to be updated about our activities, please subscribe to our email list at our project website and follow us on @socialcomquant at Twitter.
In case you have any questions, please contact us at socialcomquant@ku.edu.tr.
We look forward to hearing from you
Best wishes,
Erdem Yörük
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Governance, 2020
The period since the 1990s has witnessed the expanding political influence of the Kurdish movemen... more The period since the 1990s has witnessed the expanding political influence of the Kurdish movement across the country as well as a transformation in the welfare system, manifesting itself mainly in the emergence of extensive social assistance programs. While Turkish social assistance policy has been formally neutral regarding who is entitled to state aid, Kurds have been de facto singled out by these new welfare programs, as is shown by existing quantitative work. Based on a discourse analysis of legislation, parliamentary proceedings, and news media, this article examines the ways in which Turkish governments and policymakers consider the Kurdish question in designing welfare policies. We illustrate that Kurdish mobilization has become a central theme that informed the transformation of the Turkish welfare system over the past three decades.
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The Oxford Handbook of Turkish Politics, 2020
This chapter examines the political dynamics that have shaped the transformation of the Turkish w... more This chapter examines the political dynamics that have shaped the transformation of the Turkish welfare system since the 1960s. Over the years, income-based social assistance policies have supplanted employment-based social security policies, while the welfare state has significantly expanded. To explain why and how the Turkish welfare state has expanded during neoliberalism and why social policies have shifted from social security to social assistance, the chapter focuses on the rivalries between mainstream parties and the impact of grassroots politics, as well as the political mechanisms that mediate and transform structural pressures into policies. The chapter illustrates that political efforts to contain the political radicalization of the informal proletariat and to mobilize its elec toral support have driven the expansion of social assistance policies during the post-1980 neoliberal period. State authorities now see the informal proletariat as a more significant political threat and source of support than the formal proletariat whose dynamism drove the expansion of the welfare state during the pre-1980 developmentalist period. The chapter provides a historical analysis of the interaction between parliamentary processes and social movements in order to account for the transformation of welfare provision in Turkey. It concludes by locating Turkey in a larger context, in which other emerging markets develop similar welfare states as a response to similar political exigencies.
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Videos by Erdem Yörük
The GLOW dataset includes 381 variables on 61 countries from the years between 1989 and 2015. It covers comparable panel data on both Global North and South as we have compiled data from a large number of international and domestic sources, conducted compatibility checks, and standardized the data. GLOW provides comparable cross-national data on social assistance, as we applied the same methodology of the World Bank's ASPIRE dataset in order to build comparable indicators across developed and developing countries.
Books by Erdem Yörük
Academic Writings by Erdem Yörük
The purpose of the second work package of the EMW Project is to draw the aforementioned map of social contention. For achieving this purpose, we created a database of contentious politics events through the extraction of information from the news reports that are featured in the most prominent online sources each focus country has to offer. The Global Contentious Politics Database (GLOCON) records contentious politics events (referred to as protest events for the sake of brevity) that take place within the borders of our focus countries with all the information available in the source about the events’ time and place, actor, type, demands raised, violence level. As of the moment, the GLOCON database contains protest event data from India, China, South Africa, Argentina, and Brazil. It features data in three languages: English for India, China, and South Africa data, Spanish for Argentina data, and Portuguese for Brazil data. The database was created in a way that is able to accommodate additions of other focus countries and/or news sources in the future.
The database creation utilized automated text processing tools that detects if a news article contains a protest event, locate protest information within the article, and extract pieces of information regarding the detected protest events. The basis of training and testing the automated tools is the GLOCON Gold Standard Corpus (GSC), which contains news articles from multiple sources from each focus country. The articles in the GSC were manually coded by skilled annotators in both classification and extraction tasks with the utmost accuracy and consistency that automated tool development demands. In order to assure these, the annotation manuals in this document lay out the rules according to which annotators code the news articles. Annotators refer to the manuals at all times for all annotation tasks and apply the rules that they contain.
Despite the EMW Project's focus on the countries of the Global South, and the initial choice of a limited number of countries to be featured in the GSC, none of the rules or principles contained in this manual is more or less applicable to certain countries, sources or periods than others. The GLOCON database aims to be inclusive and capable of expanding. Securing consistency, reliability, and validity of data in the face of temporal and spatial expansion requires that annotation principles are generally applicable and that they are applied consistently.
The annotation process is composed of three main levels for each news report document. The document-level annotation determines the news articles that contain information on actual (past or ongoing) protest events. The sentence-level annotation aims to locate sentences that contain protest event-related information. In the final phase, words or phrases that give concrete information about protest events are detected.
Corresponding to the document and sentence classification, and information extraction tasks, there are three main and two supplemental manuals which together cover the entire annotation process from the document, through the sentence, to the token level. The first manual is the Document Level Protest Annotation Manual (DOLPAM) which establishes the rules for determining news articles that contain protest events; in other words, classifying news articles into those which contain protest events and those which do not. It lays out the protest event ontology, that is, the protest event definition which specifies the range of contentious politics events that are included in the scope of the project. It introduces and exemplifies different types of protest events, and defines the criteria to which a news report must conform to be labeled as a protest event article. The following Sentence Level Protest Annotation Manual (SELPAM) carries on with classifying the sentences in the documents that have already been classified as protest event articles. Similarly, it defines and exemplifies event sentences and enumerates the rules by which sentences are labeled as event sentences and non-event sentences. The third and final main manual is the Token Level Protest Annotation Manual (TOLPAM) which is the longest and most detailed of the three main level manuals. It defines the types of event-related information that the project aims at collecting from news articles and explains how expressions within the event sentences which contain these pieces of information are tagged. The remaining two manuals are supplemental manuals that label further information about the events that are already extracted in the three main levels of annotation. Both define annotation tasks that are performed on the document level. The first is the Violent Protest Events Annotation Manual which lays out the rules for classifying news reports that contain protest events into categories of violent and non-violent. The following, Protest Event Demands Annotation Manual aims at setting the rules for labeling the demands and/or grievances associated with the protest events that are extracted in the news articles. More detailed information about each manual can be found under their respective headings.
Even though every particular level of annotation has its respective annotation manual, the whole process must be thought of as an integrated whole as each level of annotation is premised on the results of the previous level. Hence, familiarizing oneself with all the manuals before starting annotation on any single level is recommended. Knowing in advance what the sentence and token level annotation tasks entail would help an annotator working on the document level considerably. That said, it is neither practical nor advisable to try to learn all annotation procedures by heart. Memory is prone to mislead, and recurrent reference to the manuals is the preferred way of utilizing them. Thus, annotators must read the entire manual before starting annotation, and remember to refer to it when there is the slightest doubt about a rule or a difficult case.
The content of the annotation manual is built on the general principles and standards of linguistic annotation laid out in other prominent annotation manuals such as ACE, CAMEO, and TimeML. These principles, however, have been adapted or rather modified heavily to accommodate the social scientific concepts and variables employed in the EMW project. The manual has been molded throughout a long trial and error process that accompanied the annotation of the GSC. It owes much of its current shape to the meticulous work and invaluable feedback provided by highly specialized teams of annotators, whose diligence and expertise greatly increased the quality of the corpus.
I am writing to invite you to apply for participation in online training workshops in computational social sciences (CSS) as well as spread the word in your circles. These workshops are organized by an EU-funded Twinning Action project, Social ComQuant, (see https://socialcomquant.ku.edu.tr/), in which Koç University is the coordinator of a consortium. The training will be provided by one of the Social ComQuant Project partners, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, which is located in Germany. Each of the three workshops of the Fall 2020 Semester will take two days and be open to the participation of around 20 participants. The Social ComQuant Project will cover the cost of participation for up to ten selected participants from Turkey for each workshop.
We offer the following workshops for Fall 2020 semester:
1. (Workshop #1) Using Social Media Data for Research: Potentials and Pitfalls (on November 9-10, 2020)
2. (Workshop #2) Introduction to Network Analysis with R (on November 26-27, 2020)
3. (Workshop #3) Digital Trace Data in Social Science (on December 7-8, 2020)
Social ComQuant Project partners GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany and ISI Foundation (Istituto Interscambio Scientifico) in Italy, which are leading institutions in Europe in the fields of computational and quantitative social sciences, will collaborate with Koç University for three years to promote research excellence in these domains in Turkey. For this aim, the project will organize summer schools, workshops, online trainings, and staff exchange programs. In the GESIS workshops, leading scientists from social sciences, computer science, mathematics, and physics will teach state-of-the-art CSS methods that are hallmarks of research in the field. They will provide extremely valuable training to both early-stage and senior researchers at no cost. Given the limitations caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the workshops will be held online for the Fall 2020 Semester, but future GESIS workshops will be held in Cologne, if the conditions allow. In that case, travel and accommodation will also be covered by the Social ComQuant Project.
To apply, you need to submit your CV and a (one-paged, single-space) cover letter to the project’s application page. In the cover letter you are expected to explain your previous experiences and future plans related to computational social sciences. We accept applications from both senior researchers and graduate students. The deadline for applying for the workshops of Fall 2020 is November 1, 2020, @23.59 (Turkey local time).
For the next three years, Social ComQuant will be offering a large number of training activities such as staff exchanges, summer schools, workshops and online courses. We are also planning to establish a Computational Social Sciences MA program at Koç University. If you would like to be updated about our activities, please subscribe to our email list at our project website and follow us on @socialcomquant at Twitter.
In case you have any questions, please contact us at socialcomquant@ku.edu.tr.
We look forward to hearing from you
Best wishes,
Erdem Yörük
The GLOW dataset includes 381 variables on 61 countries from the years between 1989 and 2015. It covers comparable panel data on both Global North and South as we have compiled data from a large number of international and domestic sources, conducted compatibility checks, and standardized the data. GLOW provides comparable cross-national data on social assistance, as we applied the same methodology of the World Bank's ASPIRE dataset in order to build comparable indicators across developed and developing countries.
The purpose of the second work package of the EMW Project is to draw the aforementioned map of social contention. For achieving this purpose, we created a database of contentious politics events through the extraction of information from the news reports that are featured in the most prominent online sources each focus country has to offer. The Global Contentious Politics Database (GLOCON) records contentious politics events (referred to as protest events for the sake of brevity) that take place within the borders of our focus countries with all the information available in the source about the events’ time and place, actor, type, demands raised, violence level. As of the moment, the GLOCON database contains protest event data from India, China, South Africa, Argentina, and Brazil. It features data in three languages: English for India, China, and South Africa data, Spanish for Argentina data, and Portuguese for Brazil data. The database was created in a way that is able to accommodate additions of other focus countries and/or news sources in the future.
The database creation utilized automated text processing tools that detects if a news article contains a protest event, locate protest information within the article, and extract pieces of information regarding the detected protest events. The basis of training and testing the automated tools is the GLOCON Gold Standard Corpus (GSC), which contains news articles from multiple sources from each focus country. The articles in the GSC were manually coded by skilled annotators in both classification and extraction tasks with the utmost accuracy and consistency that automated tool development demands. In order to assure these, the annotation manuals in this document lay out the rules according to which annotators code the news articles. Annotators refer to the manuals at all times for all annotation tasks and apply the rules that they contain.
Despite the EMW Project's focus on the countries of the Global South, and the initial choice of a limited number of countries to be featured in the GSC, none of the rules or principles contained in this manual is more or less applicable to certain countries, sources or periods than others. The GLOCON database aims to be inclusive and capable of expanding. Securing consistency, reliability, and validity of data in the face of temporal and spatial expansion requires that annotation principles are generally applicable and that they are applied consistently.
The annotation process is composed of three main levels for each news report document. The document-level annotation determines the news articles that contain information on actual (past or ongoing) protest events. The sentence-level annotation aims to locate sentences that contain protest event-related information. In the final phase, words or phrases that give concrete information about protest events are detected.
Corresponding to the document and sentence classification, and information extraction tasks, there are three main and two supplemental manuals which together cover the entire annotation process from the document, through the sentence, to the token level. The first manual is the Document Level Protest Annotation Manual (DOLPAM) which establishes the rules for determining news articles that contain protest events; in other words, classifying news articles into those which contain protest events and those which do not. It lays out the protest event ontology, that is, the protest event definition which specifies the range of contentious politics events that are included in the scope of the project. It introduces and exemplifies different types of protest events, and defines the criteria to which a news report must conform to be labeled as a protest event article. The following Sentence Level Protest Annotation Manual (SELPAM) carries on with classifying the sentences in the documents that have already been classified as protest event articles. Similarly, it defines and exemplifies event sentences and enumerates the rules by which sentences are labeled as event sentences and non-event sentences. The third and final main manual is the Token Level Protest Annotation Manual (TOLPAM) which is the longest and most detailed of the three main level manuals. It defines the types of event-related information that the project aims at collecting from news articles and explains how expressions within the event sentences which contain these pieces of information are tagged. The remaining two manuals are supplemental manuals that label further information about the events that are already extracted in the three main levels of annotation. Both define annotation tasks that are performed on the document level. The first is the Violent Protest Events Annotation Manual which lays out the rules for classifying news reports that contain protest events into categories of violent and non-violent. The following, Protest Event Demands Annotation Manual aims at setting the rules for labeling the demands and/or grievances associated with the protest events that are extracted in the news articles. More detailed information about each manual can be found under their respective headings.
Even though every particular level of annotation has its respective annotation manual, the whole process must be thought of as an integrated whole as each level of annotation is premised on the results of the previous level. Hence, familiarizing oneself with all the manuals before starting annotation on any single level is recommended. Knowing in advance what the sentence and token level annotation tasks entail would help an annotator working on the document level considerably. That said, it is neither practical nor advisable to try to learn all annotation procedures by heart. Memory is prone to mislead, and recurrent reference to the manuals is the preferred way of utilizing them. Thus, annotators must read the entire manual before starting annotation, and remember to refer to it when there is the slightest doubt about a rule or a difficult case.
The content of the annotation manual is built on the general principles and standards of linguistic annotation laid out in other prominent annotation manuals such as ACE, CAMEO, and TimeML. These principles, however, have been adapted or rather modified heavily to accommodate the social scientific concepts and variables employed in the EMW project. The manual has been molded throughout a long trial and error process that accompanied the annotation of the GSC. It owes much of its current shape to the meticulous work and invaluable feedback provided by highly specialized teams of annotators, whose diligence and expertise greatly increased the quality of the corpus.
I am writing to invite you to apply for participation in online training workshops in computational social sciences (CSS) as well as spread the word in your circles. These workshops are organized by an EU-funded Twinning Action project, Social ComQuant, (see https://socialcomquant.ku.edu.tr/), in which Koç University is the coordinator of a consortium. The training will be provided by one of the Social ComQuant Project partners, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, which is located in Germany. Each of the three workshops of the Fall 2020 Semester will take two days and be open to the participation of around 20 participants. The Social ComQuant Project will cover the cost of participation for up to ten selected participants from Turkey for each workshop.
We offer the following workshops for Fall 2020 semester:
1. (Workshop #1) Using Social Media Data for Research: Potentials and Pitfalls (on November 9-10, 2020)
2. (Workshop #2) Introduction to Network Analysis with R (on November 26-27, 2020)
3. (Workshop #3) Digital Trace Data in Social Science (on December 7-8, 2020)
Social ComQuant Project partners GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany and ISI Foundation (Istituto Interscambio Scientifico) in Italy, which are leading institutions in Europe in the fields of computational and quantitative social sciences, will collaborate with Koç University for three years to promote research excellence in these domains in Turkey. For this aim, the project will organize summer schools, workshops, online trainings, and staff exchange programs. In the GESIS workshops, leading scientists from social sciences, computer science, mathematics, and physics will teach state-of-the-art CSS methods that are hallmarks of research in the field. They will provide extremely valuable training to both early-stage and senior researchers at no cost. Given the limitations caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the workshops will be held online for the Fall 2020 Semester, but future GESIS workshops will be held in Cologne, if the conditions allow. In that case, travel and accommodation will also be covered by the Social ComQuant Project.
To apply, you need to submit your CV and a (one-paged, single-space) cover letter to the project’s application page. In the cover letter you are expected to explain your previous experiences and future plans related to computational social sciences. We accept applications from both senior researchers and graduate students. The deadline for applying for the workshops of Fall 2020 is November 1, 2020, @23.59 (Turkey local time).
For the next three years, Social ComQuant will be offering a large number of training activities such as staff exchanges, summer schools, workshops and online courses. We are also planning to establish a Computational Social Sciences MA program at Koç University. If you would like to be updated about our activities, please subscribe to our email list at our project website and follow us on @socialcomquant at Twitter.
In case you have any questions, please contact us at socialcomquant@ku.edu.tr.
We look forward to hearing from you
Best wishes,
Erdem Yörük
Let me clarify what a contradiction means. German sociologist Claus Offe defines a contradiction as an inherent tendency in a system to destroy the conditions on which its survival depends. This concept constitutes a key element in the Marxist analyses of capitalism because capitalism is thought to continuously and inevitably undermine itself. Marx himself argued for several such contradictions that weaken and maybe wipe out capitalism. For example, each individual capitalist tends to lower wages in his or her workplace, which is entirely "rational" for a capitalist, but the overall effect of these individual decisions is to dampen wage levels in the larger society to such a low level that workers become unable to buy the products produced by the capitalists. This is the so-called over-production crisis. Capitalists do their best to maximize their interests, but they happen to undermine their own interests. Likewise, each capitalist tends to increase the level of technology to make each worker more productive so that they can exploit each worker more. In a way, they replace workers with machines. As an effect, the total number of workers and the total volume of exploitation decline. So does the total volume of profit. Marx calls this the law of falling rate of profit.
Coronavirus seems to be the latest instance of such contradictions. The virus is singled out by scientists by its extraordinary rate of spread and death rate. This rate of spread is not only natural or biological, but it is also determined socially – meaning the demography, culture, and most importantly connectedness of the society. Connectedness is a function of the social division of labour, which has exponentially escalated during neoliberal globalization. Mobility of goods and people has unprecedentedly increased, just like almost two hundred years ago, when a previous wave of globalization had connected the world, as The Communist Manifesto makes clear:
"The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe."
Contemporary globalization is, in no small part, a result of the falling rate of profits that occurred by the 1970s because of the rising political power and wage levels of working classes in national developmentalist economies. So, the solution was to remove the borders for production and to stimulate a race to the bottom among workers. This enhanced agility and mobility have rendered countries vulnerable to any external shocks, be it economic, political, or biological, in our case. Global air traffic, that is, the number of passengers carried, has increased more than ten-fold to 4.1 billion people per year between 1970 and 2017. How can you stop the spread of a very contagious virus in such traffic?
Similar to the rate of spread, the death rate of the virus is not biologically given. Instead, varying death rates across countries (0.22% in Germany and 7.69% in Italy) show that it is the social conditions that shape the final death rate. Among these conditions, the capacity of the public healthcare system is the most critical factor in translating the biological threat of the virus into the actual rate of mortality. The differences in German and Italian medical capacities and precisely in the number of intensive care units are considered the main factors behind this huge gap in mortality rates. Italy, like other southern European countries, underwent significant retrenchment in public healthcare programs in order to be able to eligible for the bailouts needed during the debt crisis of the early 2010s. Therefore, a key facet of the contradiction of contemporary capitalism is that the capitalist drive to retrench public healthcare systems to minimize taxes and social security costs have disqualified most public healthcare systems from responding to the outbreak. That observation has abruptly led the Spanish government to nationalize the private healthcare system.
These two tendencies, high rate of spread and high death rates, which are, to a large extent, consequences of the capitalist strategy for profit maximization, have undermined the capitalist capacity to profit. As we are observing, the economic harms that are being created by the virus are unprecedented and disastrous. Businesses stop, services stop, finance stops, streets are emptied, life is abandoned. The interventions by the FED and IMF do not suffice to calm the markets and feed the economy. We are headed for one of the grandest economic crises of modern times. The fact that national economies are so interdependent and that public healthcare systems are so weakened makes each economy extremely vulnerable to such an external threat. This is not to be for or against globalization; this is to say that a strategy to foster a capitalist economy, which was by and in itself very rational for capitalists, has turned into a fetter.
A point of bifurcation, and what is to be done?
What will come out of this contradiction? I think there are two paths: One towards more authoritarianism and one towards more liberty. On the one hand, governments around the world are taking extraordinary measures to contain the outbreak, which included emergency state rules of a varying degree, such as curfews, closure of public spaces, limits to human mobility, etc. This is happening on top of already ever stronger authoritarian trends almost everywhere. Governments will definitely make use of the coronavirus to establish, consolidate, and escalate authoritarian policies during and after the outbreak. Many people now see authoritarian governments as better equipped to cope with the crisis, as these governments are thought to coordinate the preventive measures better. This perception will create extensive legitimacy for authoritarianism. Moreover, governments are developing new methods, techniques, and knowledge to govern and discipline the population. The question that most people will ask will now be what type of authoritarian governments are performing better.
On the other hand, in these extraordinary times, ordinary people experience solidarity on top of the cruelty of capitalism. And it is the time to share the message that capitalism, be it authoritarian or liberal, cannot but create a disaster, just because of its own dynamics. The left must take this opportunity to organize itself internationally and to offer emancipation out of these disastrous contradictions of capitalism, right today and in the future.
Erdem Yörük is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Koç University and an Associate Member in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford. He is the principal investigator an ERC-funded project, Emerging Welfare (emw.ku.edu.tr)
You can find more information on GLOW and the EMW Project in the following Youtube videos:
GLOW: https://youtu.be/SjAhuzZCR08
EMW: https://youtu.be/Xlbqpcs3mn0
The GLOW dataset includes 381 variables on 61 countries from the years between 1989 and 2015. It covers comparable panel data on both Global North and South as we have compiled data from a large number of international and domestic sources, conducted compatibility checks, and standardized the data. GLOW provides comparable cross-national data on social assistance, as we applied the same methodology of the World Bank's ASPIRE dataset in order to build comparable indicators across developed and developing countries. We have also extracted employee and employer contributions from SSA reports for all case countries.
In addition to welfare policy indicators, GLOW covers three other main categories of data, namely development, economy, and politics. As such, it provides panel data not only for social policy scholars but for sociologists, economists, and political scientists, and other social scientists. Researchers will find a wide range of standardized panel data that can serve as independent, dependent, or control variables in their quantitative analyses. GLOW also provides visualizations of welfare policy indicators across time and geography, and scholars can use it for descriptive purposes, as well.
We very much hope that GLOW will contribute to the scholarly efforts to reach a global theory of welfare states and welfare regimes. It is an outcome of a collective three-year-long effort of the large team of international researchers of the Emerging Welfare project. I want to thank my colleagues for their effort in the creation of this dataset, and I hope that GLOW will be a useful source of comparative welfare policy research. I will appreciate it if you can spread the word in your circles and if you can send us any feedback on GLOW, as well.
The importance of the relatively new left-wing party in this election has not gone unnoticed by those whose tactic is violence. In the last few days assaults on HDP activists and others working for the party have mounted, with four people killed in a party rally in Diyarbakır yesterday, most likely by far-right forces, in an apparent attempt to assassinate party co-chairman Selahattin Demirtaş, who was standing about thirty meters from where the bomb exploded.
Over the last few decades violence both physical and structural has played a major part in the creation of a sociopolitical terrain in which, in proletarian sections of many major cities, the AKP and the HDP are now the two parties fighting over votes. Recently we sat down with Erdem Yörük, sociologist at Koç University in Istanbul and expert on the recent history of the working class in Turkey, to discuss these historical developments and assess the HDP’s chances of making history in this critical election.