Political Cyberscapes III: Neoliberalism and Capitalism

This is a short post because we've all been busy conferencing this week. (Apologies to those who are cringing at the use of a perfectly good noun as a verb.) Following up on an earlier post on communism, capitalism and socialism and another on Democracy and Dictatorship we're taking a quick look at the distribution of references to neoliberalism and capitalism in the European context.

In the global map it is quite striking the high relative numbers of references to neoliberal in South America which corresponds well to the strong presence of neoliberal discourse (both promoting and critiquing it) there. Argentina (and its associated financial crisis) scores highly as does Venezuela with it anti-neoliberal President Hugh Chavez. Ghana in West Africa also stands out strongly.

References to Neoliberal Worldwide

Although we already mapped capitalism, we thought it worth while zooming into the European level given the clear divide between the formerly communist East and Western Europe. Also intriguing arethe high scores achieved by the three Baltic states, Hungary and the Czech and Slovak republics as well as Belgium's relative low score compared to its surrounding neighbors. We'll spare you the Belgium jokes for now.....

References to Capitalism in Europe

Political Cyberscapes II: Capitalism, Communism and Socialism

Following the first part of this series of maps on political cyberscapes, we now turn to mapping the keywords "capitalism", "communism" and "socialism" as they appear in Google Maps placemarks. The goal of this analysis is to see whether or not these references correspond to the world's political economic realities in the same way that previous maps of online references were closely tied to the offline world.

References to "Capitalism"

References to "capitalism" in Google Maps placemarks correspond closely to our expectations. Although most countries could be classified as capitalist (of one degree or another), the term is most closely associated with the capitalist countries of North American and western Europe. The highest relative concentration of references to capitalism exists in both the United States and Canada, with most of the European Union coming in with slightly fewer references. Interesting, however, is that other successful capitalist countries, like Japan and Australia, do not score highly with this measure.

References to "Communism"

The geography of references to "communism" highlights many countries with strong associations to it. For example, the communist states of Cuba, Turkmenistan and Laos are all of the highest classification while Vietnam, the Baltic states forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union, a number of other former Soviet republics within Central Asia and Croatia formerly part of the communist state of Yugoslavia. While the absence of both China and North Korea on this map is somewhat perplexing, this is likely tied to our use of English search terms. (This issue is equally evident in the below map of the term "socialism".)

The places with the highest concentrations of references to "socialism" are, like references to "capitalism" and "communism", mostly what one would expect; Cuba, Libya, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Sri Lanka, Laos, and Vietnam all score highly in this measure. Likewise, within the South American region, Venezuela (home to the outspoken and left-leaning Hugo Chavez) exhibits the most relative references to socialism. Interestingly the distribution of references to socialism is more dispersed than references to communism which corresponds to the offline situation as well.

References to "Socialism"

The relatively high number of references to "socialism" within the U.S. is a bit perplexing, as the U.S. has a long history of anti-socialist rhetoric. Although we do not know the specific context of each of these placemarks, we do note that over the past two years, the policy programs (e.g., health care) of the Obama administration have been heavily (and incorrectly) critiqued by the right wing as being socialist. It seems likely then that some of these references may be associated, albeit in a negative manner, with President Obama and his policies.