A majority of scholars tend to view the successful expansion of Hezbollah's influence in Lebanon as three variables: Iran’s support, military capabilities, and the ideological role of Islamism. However, in addition to these variables, this study hypothesizes that Hezbollah's capacity as a social welfare provider, has played a significant role in maintaining and strengthening its influence in the Lebanese politics.
In order to test the above hypothesis, this study conducts data mining research to find specific rules or patterns of Al Jazeera English newspaper articles which are collected with the search word, ‘Hezbollah.' R-based data mining package Quanteda is used for data mining analysis. In particular, major keywords related to Hezbollah and the relevance of them are explained through co-occurance and topic analyses.