<scp>Relatio</scp>: Text Semantics Capture Political and Economic Narratives

Abstract Social scientists have become increasingly interested in how narratives —the stories fiction, politics, and life—shape beliefs, behavior, government policies. This paper provides an unsupervised method to quantify latent narrative structures text documents. Our new software package relatio identifies coherent entity groups maps explicit relations between them the text. We provide application U.S. Congressional Record analyze political economic recent decades. analysis highlights dynamics, sentiment, polarization, interconnectedness of discourse.