Studying ideational change in Russian politics with topic models and word embeddings

Peer reviewe

Measuring and Comparing Party Ideology and Heterogeneity

Estimates of party ideological positions in Western Democracies yield useful party-level information, but lack the ability to provide insight into intraparty politics. In this paper, we generate comparable measures of latent individual policy positions from elite survey data which enable analysis of elite-level party ideology and heterogeneity. This approach has advantages over both expert surveys and approaches based on behavioral data, such as roll call voting and is directly relevant to the study of party cohesion. We generate a measure of elite positions for several European countries using a common space scaling approach and demonstrate its validity as a measure of party ideology. We then apply these data to determine the sources of party heterogeneity, focusing on the role of intraparty competition in electoral systems, nomination rules, and party goals. We find that policy-seeking parties and centralized party nomination rules reduce party heterogeneity. While intraparty competition has no effect, the presence of these electoral rules conditions the effect of district magnitude

Words as Data: Content Analysis in Legislative Studies

Legislatures in democratic countries generate tons of documents ranging from draft bills to amendments to bills, adopted legislation, committee reports, and transcripts of floor debates. Sifting through the entire legislative record is a challenging task. Thanks to the advent of digital technology, parliamentary records can now be stored in easily searchable on-line databases, making them more accessible to researchers and available for large-scale data analysis. Moreover, political scientists can use these documents to study representation, party politics, policy-making, and legislative behavior. This chapter examines recent technological advances that have allowed scholars to analyze the vast amounts of textual data produced by legislatures year in and year out. It describes content analysis, focusing on recent approaches that treat ?words as data.? It also considers some important applications to comparative study of political parties and legislatures and discusses the challenges faced by scholars moving forward before concluding with a look at the continuing trends in the field

The Politics of Multispeed Integration in the European Union

EU member states desiring deeper integration often call for a multispeed approach to pursue ambitious projects without the hinderance of laggards. At other times, laggards have desired a multispeed approach to avoid policies they find objectionable. Under what circumstances do laggards (integrationists) propose (object) to a multispeed Europe? We investigate the institutions and member state preferences that lead these camps to accept or resist multispeed proposals, paying particular attention to how a multispeed approach affects member state bargaining power. We present a series of case studies to demonstrate that the preference configurations we examine do, in fact, lead states to pursue the policies with regard to a multispeed Europe that we expect

Positions of interest groups towards labour market reforms in Germany : a novel content analysis of press releases

Unions, employers’ associations and social welfare organizations play an important part in reforming the labour market. This study investigates their positions in this policy field, in particular towards minimum wages and labour market regulations. Two contradicting arguments are outlined concerning the interest groups’ strategic interests. They have to represent their core membership and, at the same time, pursue strategic long-term goals that might contradict their clienteles’ interests. We estimate the interest groups’ positions with a content analysis. This method is regularly used for political parties but has not been applied to interest groups so far. About 1500 press releases from 14 organizations serve as our data source. We find that unions pursue different strategies depending on their (potential) membership. The service union strongly advocate the introduction of a minimum wage while industrial unions focus on stricter regulation of atypical contracts. Employers’ associations generally oppose minimum wages but their main priority is defending the flexibility of agency work. The positions of social welfare organizations are shaped by their dual role as representative of the marginalized and as employers in the social sector. Overall, we show that content analysis is a valuable tool to analyse positions of interest groups