Beyond policy positions

Estimating Policy Positions from Political Texts

D eriving reliable and valid estimates of the policy positions of key actors is fundamental to the analysis of political competition. Various systematic methods have been used to do this, including surveys of voters, politicians, and political scientists, and the content analysis of policy documents. Each method has advantages and disadvantages but, for both theoretical and pragmatic reasons, p...

Food Policy Beyond Neo-Liberalism

Disparate foundations of scientists' policy positions on contentious biomedical research.

What drives scientists' position taking on matters where empirical answers are unavailable or contradictory? We examined the contentious debate on whether to limit experiments involving the creation of potentially pandemic pathogens. Hundreds of scientists, including Nobel laureates, have signed petitions on the debate, providing unique insights into how scientists take a public stand on import...

Scaling Policy Positions From Coded Units of Political Texts∗

Applying a coding scheme to discrete text units has long been the most common method for estimating substantive quantities of interest about the authors of these texts, whether for political, social, economic, or other substantive reasons. In political analysis, researchers typically build scales of policy positions from the relative frequencies of text units coded as left versus right policy c...

Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data

We present a new way of extracting policy positions from political texts that treats texts not as discourses to be understood and interpreted but rather, as data in the form of words. We compare this approach to previous methods of text analysis and use it to replicate published estimates of the policy positions of political parties in Britain and Ireland, on both economic and social policy dim...