The Enemy from Within: A Study of Political Delegitimization Discourse in Israeli Political Speech

The Enemy from Within: A Study of Political Delegitimization Discourse in Israeli Political Speech Naama Rivlin-Angert Guy Mor-Lan

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The Enemy from Within: A Study of Political Delegitimization Discourse in Israeli Political Speech 2025 EMNLP 2025 rivlinangert2025-enemy-within rivlinangert2025-enemy-within.txt, the project's staged copy 48ff038ac6991c6a765385adbd2a8b1063e3c202 CC-BY-4.0 political-science

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0 spans located by searching the stored text for the quote's exact words, allowing any whitespace between them method Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. political delegitimization discourse Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. system-or-tool-building system-or-tool-building Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. mechanisms a two-stage pipeline: a binary classifier first decides whether a sentence carries PDD at all, and only sentences it marks positive go on to be classified for properties and target spans Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. mechanisms the category is drawn by what the utterance DOES to the target's standing rather than by whether it is rude, and the paper says this is why classifiers built on surface hostility miss the subtle cases Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. mechanisms the boundary against policy criticism is enforced by a worked NEGATIVE example rather than by a rule Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. mechanisms every proportion is computed by aggregating at the SPEAKER level first, so that prolific politicians cannot dominate the rate Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. mechanisms distinctive targets per political bloc are identified with a weighted log-odds method rather than by raw frequency Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The study's scope and transferability are limited. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Findings from the Hebrew-language, Israeli case may not generalize to other languages or political systems. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The social media analysis covers only Facebook posts from 2018-2021, excluding other platforms and later periods. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Porting the approach to other languages and political contexts is expected to be difficult because delegitimization is shaped by local dynamics. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The category is defined by excluding policy criticism, a line a coder must draw in each sentence. what this limits: any count of delegitimizing speech from this corpus: a sentence counts only if the hostile characterization is Quotation withheld, which is a judgement made per sentence Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Reliability was established on a 170-sentence sample by coders who include the study's lead author. what this limits: the reliability of the labels underlying these results: annotation was by three human annotators including the lead author, with agreement measured on a sample of 170 sentences Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Only a sixth of the labelled corpus carries the finer annotations the characterisation rests on. what this limits: claims here about intensity, incivility, target type or affective framing: those annotations exist for 642 instances, against 1,812 sentences exhibiting the phenomenon in a corpus of 10,410 Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The category is proposed by this paper rather than inherited from the literature. what this limits: treating PDD as an established construct: it is proposed in this paper as a distinct analytical category alongside the pipeline built to detect it Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. transformer encoder models (multilingual mBERT, and the Hebrew-targeted AlephBERT and HeRO) and LLM decoders, applied to detect political delegitimization discourse in Knesset and social media text Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the weighted log-odds method for identifying tokens most strongly associated with a group, applied to political blocs Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the annotated dataset split 70 per cent train, 15 per cent validation, 15 per cent test eliminates: reporting classifier performance on data used to fit or to select it - the three-way split separates fitting, model choice and reporting · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Political Delegitimization Discourse Political Delegitimization Discourse Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. PDD PDD Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. policy critique policy critique Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. incivility incivility Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. annotation scheme annotation scheme Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. PDD - A STIPULATED CATEGORY WHOSE BOUNDARY IS SYMBOL VERSUS POLICY: hostility toward a political actor counts only when it is not grounded in policy critique, so the same anger about the same target falls inside or outside the category depending on what the coder judges it to be aimed at Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the boundary, SHOWN RATHER THAN STATED: the paper prints a sentence calling a budget an example of negligence and promiscuous conduct endangering the economy and society, and records that it is NOT annotated as PDD - a published negative case, which is rarer in this corpus than a definition Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the conceptual definition BEHIND the annotation scheme: discourse aimed at discrediting political groups or actors by attacking their symbolic and affective dimensions - the scheme is built on that phrase, and every count in the paper inherits it Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. builds-on → Rivlin-Angert (2025), on delegitimization of political identities Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. builds-on → Mor-Lan et al. (2024), IsraParlTweet dataset of Knesset speeches Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. builds-on → Monroe et al. (2008), weighted log odds method Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. extends → existing NLP tasks: toxicity detection, stance detection, targeted sentiment analysis Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. PDD —same-as→ Political Delegitimization Discourse PDD Political Delegitimization Discourse strength of the relation: 1 Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. PDD —distinct-from→ policy critique PDD policy critique strength of the relation: 1 Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Delegitimization intensity was rated on a three-point scale. about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Early computational approaches used supervised classifiers to detect abusive language aimed at politicians. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. inter-coder reliability on a 170-sentence sample: average correlation 0.91 and average Cohen's Kappa 0.82, called substantial agreement inter-coder reliability on a 170-sentence sample: average correlation 0.91 and average Cohen's Kappa 0.82, called substantial agreement Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the rise in parliamentary PDD: mean share 6.6% to 9.8%, reported with t = -105.24 and p < 0.01 alongside |d| = 0.13 the rise in parliamentary PDD: mean share 6.6% to 9.8%, reported with t = -105.24 and p < 0.01 alongside |d| = 0.13 Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the gender difference: 0.066 against 0.055, called modest in the same sentence as significant, t = 2.613, p = 0.010, |d| = 0.268 the gender difference: 0.066 against 0.055, called modest in the same sentence as significant, t = 2.613, p = 0.010, |d| = 0.268 Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the corpus: 10,410 annotated sentences, 1,812 PDD-positive at 17.4%, and 642 carrying the second-stage annotations the corpus: 10,410 annotated sentences, 1,812 PDD-positive at 17.4%, and 642 carrying the second-stage annotations Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution.

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