This paper analyzed the “people’s” perceptions of threats to Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs) — an umbrella organization of former Shiite militias criticized for instigating sectarian conflict in Iraq — and its transformation by applying quantitative text analysis of Twitter data. The PMUs, which emerged during the chaos sparked by the fall of Mosul at the hands of IS in 2014, were perceived as “heroes” for saving Iraq from a national crisis as it liberated a number of IS-controlled areas successively. Once the PMUs were exposed for their violations against Sunnis, however, people began to recognize them as a “threat,” one which provoked sectarian conflicts. To clarify this transformation in people’s ambivalent perceptions of the PMUs, we collected all tweets in Arabic related to the PMUs posted on Twitter and analyzed them using a machine learning method called Latent Semantic Scaling. The results revealed that people’s perception of threats to the PMUs is higher when it is discussed within the context of Iran, which provides full support for the PMUs, compared with other topics. In addition, people’s perceptions of the threat tended to increase almost twice as much when the PMUs’ political influence expanded, rather than when its military influence increased.

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The tenure of the longest-serving Israeli Prime Minister, the incumbent Benjamin Netanyahu, was temporarily interrupted as a result of the Knesset election in 2021. The party that succeeded in forming a government was the relatively new and rising center party Yesh Atid. The objective of this study is to demonstrate that the center parties gained seats by taking away them from left-wing parties, particularly Labor. For this purpose, I analyzed historical data on election results, such as the number of seats, share of votes, and raw polling data from the Israel National Election Studies (INES) using Stata statistical software. I calculated the percentages of votes for the right, left, and center parties as groups, showing that the center parties gained seats when Labor lost them and lost seats when Labor gained them. This suggests that the center parties expanded their election base at the expense of Labor. My analysis shows that 50% of those who voted for the Zionist Camp led by Labor in 2015 voted for the Blue and White list of Yesh Atid in 2019. Why then do center parties take votes away from the left? One reason for this is the decreasing support for peace with Palestinians and normalization with Arab countries, which were Labor’s major achievements.

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