Measuring political positions from legislative speech

Lauderdale, Benjamin E. and Herzog, Alexander (2016) Measuring political positions from legislative speech. Political Analysis, 24 (3). pp. 374-394. ISSN 1047-1987

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Abstract

Existing approaches to measuring political disagreement from text data perform poorly except when applied to narrowly selected texts discussing the same issues and written in the same style. We demonstrate the first viable approach for estimating legislator-specific scores from the entire speech corpus of a legislature, while also producing extensive information about the evolution of speech polarization and politically loaded language. In the Irish Dail, we show that the dominant dimension of speech variation is government-opposition, with ministers more extreme on this dimension than backbenchers, and a second dimension distinguishing between the establishment and anti-establishment opposition parties. In the US Senate, we estimate a dimension that has moderate within-party correlations with scales based on roll-call votes and campaign donation patterns, however we observe greater overlap across parties in speech positions than roll call positions and partisan polarization in speeches varies more clearly in response to major political events.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	http://pan.oxfordjournals.org/
Additional Information:	© 2016 Society for Political Methodology
Library of Congress subject classification:	J Political Science > JC Political theory
Sets:	Departments > Methodology
Date Deposited:	12 May 2016 09:13
URL:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/66498/

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