Measuring Anti-Westernism in Elite Political Speeches

In Prep

Yunus Emre Tapan (Northeastern University) · Evren Balta

Anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism are usually studied one country at a time, as though each nation’s grievance were its own — yet strongmen across very different regimes seem to reach for a strikingly similar vocabulary. So do non-Western leaders construct anti-Western narratives the same way, and how does the framing vary across countries, themes, and time? This project extends the Anti-Americanism measurement framework from public tweets to elite speech, using LLM-based multi-label classification to decompose the rhetoric of three leaders — Narendra Modi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Vladimir Putin — into its constituent dimensions.

Findings forthcoming.

Concept
Anti-Western rhetoric in elite discourse
Methods
LLM-based multi-label classification, computational text analysis
Data
Political speeches of Modi (India), Erdoğan (Turkey), and Putin (Russia)