Politics/turkey-chp-finetune

Language: Turkish.

Finetuning dataset for detecting delegimitizing language towards Turkish political party CHP.

Sentence-level dataset. Sentences extracted from news articles and filtered down to include CHP mentions through party abbrevations and leader surnames during their tenure.

Sentences were labeled by a fine-tuned GPT-4o model containing ~800 manually labeled sentences which was evaluated on the held-out set of ~800 sentences, resulting in an F1 score of 84%. Then this fine-tuned GPT-4o model was used to predict labels for this wider set of sentences, which are used to finetune a dbmdz/convbert-base-turkish-mc4-cased model

The label column is "villain", 1 for sentences that portray CHP as villainous, and 0 otherwise, according to the below codebook which was used as the system prompt during fine-tuning and inference for GPT-4o finetuning.

CHP

CHP as the villain

Illegitimacy Component

For the illegitimacy component of polarizing rhetoric, we focus on sentences which portray the main opposition party, CHP, as an illegitimate political actor. More specifically, sentences containing similar claims to categories below, are coded as instances where CHP is shown as illegitimate.

• CHP plotting or supporting coup plans, and/or undermining democracy: Such sentences claim that CHP is upholding the legacy of the military coups in Turkey, or as having the same mindset and actively supporting the past military interventions. In addition, implications of CHP’s cooperation in or support of coup plans against the AKP government are also coded as illegitimate mentions of CHP.
• CHP working with terrorist groups and/or their supporters: These sentences claim that CHP is cooperating with or supporting groups recognized by Turkey as terrorist organizations, such as the Kurdish PKK, KCK, and Gülenist FETÖ. I also include claims that CHP is collaborating with or advocating for the Kurdish party in the parliament, HDP. AKP government and allies since the breaking down of peace talks on the Kurdish issue, have repeatedly called HDP as the “political wing” of the PKK, and blamed CHP as supporting terrorism (Kaya & Whiting, 2019).
• CHP being against nation’s interest or working to undermine the “general will” of the public: These sentences claim that CHP is against the nation’s interests, that it does not have the interest of the nation in mind in its policies, actions, or ideas. In addition, sentences that say the opposition party is actively working against the interests of the Turkish nation or state, for example in areas of foreign policy, fight against terror, etc., are also included.
• Implications of CHP cadres as taken over by or supportive of foreign interests: These claim that CHP administration has been bribed to, coerced to, or willingly partakes in working with international and domestic interests that are undermining the Turkish state or nation.

Immorality Component

For the immorality component of polarizing rhetoric, we focus on sentences which portray the main opposition party, CHP, as an immoral political actor. More specifically, sentences containing similar claims to categories below, are coded as instances where CHP is shown as immoral.

• Implications of CHP and its politicians in general as lacking morals and principles: These sentences vilify the opposition as liars, hypocrites, etc., and/or without principles or morals.
• Allegations of corruption, misconduct, and malpractice: These claim that CHP and its politicians engage in corrupt practices or abuse their power.
• Interpersonal insults, threats, attacks, and slander: These sentences show politicians from CHP as insulting, slandering, or threatening parts of society, other politicians, public figures, including the president.
• Not respecting public morals or religious values of society: These sentences either show CHP as violating or disrespecting supposedly established norms and values in society. These also include references to past occurrences of such instances.