Week 10

Using Text to Measure Ideology - Scaling

Author

Tiago Ventura

Published

March 27, 2024

Topics

  • What are scaling models and what can they tell us?
  • Can we represent politicians/users ideology using text?

Readings

Required Readings

  • Laver, Michael, Kenneth Benoit, and John Garry. 2003. “Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data”. American Political Science Review. 97, 2, 311-331

  • Slapin, Jonathan and Sven-Oliver Prokschk. 2008. “A Scaling Model for Estimating Time-Series Party Positions from Texts.” American Journal of Political Science. 52, 3 705-722

Non-Required Readings

  • Barberá, Pablo. “Birds of the same feather tweet together: Bayesian ideal point estimation using Twitter data.” Political analysis 23, no. 1 (2015): 76-91.Harvard

  • Aruguete, Natalia, Ernesto Calvo, and Tiago Ventura. “News by popular demand: Ideological congruence, issue salience, and media reputation in news sharing.” The International Journal of Press/Politics 28, no. 3 (2023): 558-579.

  • Rheault, Ludovic, and Christopher Cochrane. “Word embeddings for the analysis of ideological placement in parliamentary corpora.” Political Analysis 28, no. 1 (2020): 112-133.

  • Izumi, Mauricio Y., and Danilo B. Medeiros. “Government and opposition in legislative speechmaking: using text-as-data to estimate Brazilian political parties’ policy positions.” Latin American Politics and Society 63, no. 1 (2021): 145-164.

Coding Materials

Slides