Background

• Event data are key for understanding political dynamics
• Media reports are the most comprehensive documentation
• Positive: AI/ML provides new tools to extract information from text
• Negative: Existing media corpora have poor coverage of domestic media outlets in developing countries
• MLP provides high-quality corpus and flexible text processing infrastructure

High Quality Corpus

Output: Monthly data

• 62 countries
• 2012 - last month

Detecting Civic Space Events in Text

Data Processing Pipeline

Findings

• International media sources have limited, skewed coverage of events in developing countries
  • Event datasets that rely on global language sources will have major biases
• Accurate data collection from national news sources requires careful human curation
  • GDELT, Common Crawl, Internet Archive include major errors

Importance of Domestic News

Importance of Domestic News

::: notes - most of our news comes from national sources - fundamental differences in the type of events covered by domestic and international sources :::

Importance of Domestic News

Importance of Domestic News

Lexis Nexis vs MLP

Countries where LN has zero local sources: 6/56

• Albania, Belarus, Kosovo, Jamaica, Angola, South Sudan

Comparing LN on other metrics:

• Fewer languages: 17 vs 34
• Slightly more local sources per country: 5.5 vs 5 (median; excluding MLP’s regional sources)
• Shorter, more sporadic coverage over time

Challenges of Scraping

Scraping Case Study

Bangladesh: easiest case for automated scrapers

• Massive volume
• Good web architecture
• 2/5 sources are in English

Scraping Domestic Outlets is Tough

GDELT

• MLP: 2013 and 2015
• GDELT: 2019 forward
• GDELT’s best covered source: 2,100 articles/mo compared to 2,500 per month from MLP
• Broken links, redirects, duplicate articles, and advertising
• Restricts requests to one search every 5 seconds, so that scraping even a single source for the full time-period can take several days

Scraping Domestic Outlets is Tough

Internet Archive

• Took nearly two weeks to collect URLs from a single source from 2019-2023
• Numerous irrelevant, broken, and duplicate links
• Less than half or urls were usable

Random Audit of 5 MLP Countries

Task

• Use algorithm to identify major events
• Use GPT to summarize 5 most important events
• Human check of location and event classification accuracy

Results

• 40 events detected from April - June 2024 (300 possible)
• Correct country: 34/40
• Correct event: 38/40

Why Travel Advisories?

• Request from US State Department
  • High-level travel advisories trigger deployment of resources
  • Anticipating location, timing of warnings can help smooth budgets
• Travel advisories include political instability, natural disasters, health risks, etc

Data

• Target: onset of a serious travel advisory
• Predictors: MLP data, indicator for continued advisories, years, time trend, Bayesian country encoding

Modeling

• Forecast Horizon: 3 and 6 months
• Model: LightGBM + Temporal CV
• Hyperparameters: Wide grid search for learning rate, proportion of features, depth of trees
• Evaluation Metrics:
  • ROC-AUC: ranking months in test set
  • AUC-PR: optimal for imbalanced data

Performance

Performance

Performance

Performance

Feature Importance

Resurgent Authoritarian Influence?

1. Introduce data on Russian and Chinese influence on developing countries
2. Describe influence cross-nationally and over time
3. Examine Russia’s pre-invasion behavior

Resurgent Authoritarian Influence?

Background:

• Collapse of Soviet Union: less influence by autocracies
• Recently, powerful autocracies becoming more assertive in foreign policy

Foreign Influence:

• Actions by the government of an influencing country to affect the policies, capacity, or behavior of a target country to advance its own national interests

Influence Tools

Example of Hard Power

Describing RAI: Spheres

1. Russian influence is more concentrated in a geographic sphere of influence
2. Spheres of influence are shifting over time
3. Russia has dramatically expanded its sphere in recent years, challenging China’s dominance

Describing RAI: Spheres

Describing RAI: Spheres

Describing RAI: Spheres

Describing RAI: Tools

• Economic Power is the most prevalent theme
• Beginning in 2022, Diplomacy increases dramatically in places where Russia’s influence grew

Describing RAI: Tools

Describing RAI: Tools

Describing RAI: Tools

Describing RAI: Tools

Did Russia Signal Invasion?

Did Russia Signal Invasion?

Did Russia Signal Invasion?

Did Russia Signal Invasion?

Did Russia Signal Invasion?

Hard Power

Diplomacy

Diplomacy

Diplomacy

• Countries with change points:
  • 2022: 30
  • 2021: 5
  • Previous high of 4 in 2014
  • 2017-2020: average of 1

Diplomacy

• True Positives:
  • Aug-Jan: Antagonism (Kosovo), celebration (Bangladesh), military intervention (Kazakhstan)
  • Feb 1-23: High profile meetings (Serbia, Belarus, Nicaragua, Hungary, Turkey), major statements (Albania, India)
• False Positives:
  • Aug- Jan: domestic reporting on geopolitics (El Salvador, Peru)
  • Feb 1-23: domestic reporting on/criticism of Russian build-up (Cameroon, Jamaica, Nepal, Philippines)

Hard Power

Hard Power

• Countries with change points:
  • 2022: 18
  • 2021: 8
  • Previous high of 5 in 2015
  • 2016-2020: average of 2.2

Hard Power

• True Positives:
  • Aug-Jan: direct security cooperation (Mali, Pakistan, Burkina Faso, Belarus), security antagonism (Kosovo, Georgia)
  • Feb 1-23: direct security engagement (Ethiopia)
• False Positives:
  • Aug-Jan: security response over Russia’s influence on neighbors (Angola, Niger, Colombia), domestic reporting on geopolitics (Cameroon, Peru)
  • Feb 1-23: security response over Russia’s influence on neighbors (Hungary), domestic reporting on geopolitics (Bangladesh, India)

Explaining Increased Influence

• Explain variation in:
  • Countries with largest increase in Russian influence
• Potential causes of targeting:
  • Geopolitical alignment (UN Ideal Point Distance)
  • Strategic value (exports and exports)

Diplomacy - Change in Articles

Hard Power - Change in Articles

Accuracy

Russian Import Reliance

Russian Export Reliance

Exporters of Russian Imports

Importers of Russian Exports