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Media Depolarization Index
The methodology employed in the ISET Policy Institute's Media Polarization Index relies heavily on two primary Natural Language Processing (NLP) models: "Word2Vec" and its extension, "Doc2Vec". The authors trained a Georgian language "Doc2Vec" model specifically to capture semantic meanings in Georg
ian political news articles. This model was trained on a corpus exceeding 250,000 online political news articles gathered from diverse sources. Following training, the model is applied to political news articles from popular media outlets (“Imedi”, “Mtavari”, “TV Pirveli”, “1TV” (Public Broadcaster), “Formula”, “PosTV” and “Rustavi2”). The vectors generated by these models exist in a high-dimensional space and dissimilarity among news sources is measured using cosine similarity metrics. The politically biased dissimilarity between media platforms is calculated as the difference between the total dissimilarity and the average total dissimilarity within clusters (the research identifies two media clusters). The Media Polarization Index is a weighted average of political dissimilarities between media outlets, where weights are proportional to their ratings.
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December 2024 | Media (de)Polarization Index
31 December 2024

Following the announcement of suspending EU integration, the level of polarization escalated rapidly, reaching its highest point in recent periods, which was maintained at the beginning of December. Traditionally, the polarization index decreases toward the end of the year as political activity subsides with the approach of the New Year. However, despite a slight decline, the polarization level at the end of the current year remained significantly higher than in the same period of previous years.

November 2024 | Media (de)Polarization Index
02 December 2024

Polarization reached its historical maximum on November 28, 2024, following Georgian Dream’s suspension of EU accession talks, which sparked widespread protests across Tbilisi and other cities, accompanied by government-led violence against protesters. This unprecedented peak in the division came after weeks of escalating tensions, including pre-election demonstrations and the controversial nomination of Mikheil Kavelashvili, a former footballer and co-founder of the Eurosceptic People's Power party, as Georgian Dream's presidential candidate.

October 2024 | Media (de)Polarization Index
31 October 2024

Historically, pre-election periods have shown heightened polarization, with the index often peaking on election day as tensions rise and public discourse intensifies. However, this election cycle defied expectations, as both the pre-election period and election day were notably calm. While the polarization index remained stable overall, it continues to respond to specific events and shows fluctuations throughout the month.

September 2024 | Media (de)Polarization Index
30 September 2024

Calm before the storm: the polarization index remained stable in September. During the month, the ruling party, Georgian Dream, unveiled its candidate list featuring well-known athletes. Meanwhile, two opposition parties attempted, but failed, to form a new coalition ahead of the upcoming election. In addition, leaders of the Georgian Dream stirred controversy with remarks about the 2008 war with Russia.

August 2024 | Media (de)Polarization Index
02 September 2024

Despite the fact that political parties had already begun their pre-election campaigns, August was relatively quiet, with less activity and a noticeable decline in media polarisation compared to the previous month.

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