What Sounds “Right” to Me? Experiential Factors in the Perception of Political Ideology

AbstractIn this paper, we challenge the assumption that political ideology is inherently built into text by presenting an investigation into the impact of experiential factors on annotator perceptions of political ideology. We construct an annotated corpus of U.S. political discussion, where in addition to ideology labels for texts, annotators provide information about their political affiliation, exposure to political news, and familiarity with the source domain of discussion, Reddit. We investigate the variability in ideology judgments across annotators, finding evidence that these experiential factors may influence the consistency of how political ideologies are perceived. Finally, we present evidence that understanding how humans perceive and interpret ideology from texts remains a challenging task for state-of-the-art language models, pointing towards potential issues when modeling user experiences that may require more contextual knowledge.