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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Coder Reliability And Misclassification In The Human Coding Of Party Manifestos, Slava Mikhaylov, Michael Laver, Kenneth Benoit
Coder Reliability And Misclassification In The Human Coding Of Party Manifestos, Slava Mikhaylov, Michael Laver, Kenneth Benoit
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) provides the only time series of estimated party policy positions in political science and has been extensively used in a wide variety of applications. Recent work (e.g., Benoit, Laver, and Mikhaylov 2009; Klingemann et al. 2006) focuses on nonsystematic sources of error in these estimates that arise from the text generation process. Our concern here, by contrast, is with error that arises during the text coding process since nearly all manifestos are coded only once by a single coder. First, we discuss reliability and misclassification in the context of hand-coded content analysis methods. Second, we …
Natural Sentences As Valid Units For Coded Political Texts, Thomas Daubler, Kenneth Benoit, Slava Mikhaylov, Michael Laver
Natural Sentences As Valid Units For Coded Political Texts, Thomas Daubler, Kenneth Benoit, Slava Mikhaylov, Michael Laver
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
A rapidly growing area in political science has focused on perfecting techniques to treat politicaltext as ‘data’, usually for the purposes of estimating latent traits such as left–right political policypositions.1 More traditional approaches have applied classical content analysis to categorize sub-unitsof political text, such as sentences in manifestos. Prominent examples of this latter approach includethe thirty-year old Comparative Manifestos Project and the Policy Agendas Project.2 ‘Text as data’approaches use machines to convert text to quantitative information and use statistical tools to makeinferences about characteristics of the author of the text. Content analysis schemes use humans to readtextual sub-units and assign …
How To Scale Coded Text Units Without Bias: A Response To Gemenis, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver, Will Lowe, Slava Mikhaylov
How To Scale Coded Text Units Without Bias: A Response To Gemenis, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver, Will Lowe, Slava Mikhaylov
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Coding non-manifesto documents as if they were genuine policy platforms produced at election time clearly raises serious issues with error when these codings are used in the standard manner to estimate left-right policy positions. In addition to the long term solution of improving the document base of the Manifesto Project identified by Gemenis (2012), we argue that immediate gains in manifesto-based estimates of policy positions can be realised by using the confrontational logit scales from Lowe et al. (2011), which addresses the problems of scale content and scale construction that are exacerbated by but not unique to the problems found …
Will The Obama Administration Change Tack On Protectionism Before Things Get Worse?, Singapore Management University
Will The Obama Administration Change Tack On Protectionism Before Things Get Worse?, Singapore Management University
Perspectives@SMU
The new American government under President Barrack Obama is not the biggest cheerleader for free trade. With its own domestic economy entering this steep downturn, talks of protectionism in one form or another have been voiced every now and then. Catchy buzzwords like “Buy America” are gaining traction. The temptation to turn inwards, driven by the obligation to votes is growing stronger.
The Dimensionality Of Political Space: Epistemological And Methodological Considerations, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver
The Dimensionality Of Political Space: Epistemological And Methodological Considerations, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Spatial characterizations of agents' preferences lie at the heart of many theories of political competition. These give rise to explicitly dimensional interpretations. Parties define and differentiate themselves in terms of substantive policy issues, and the configuration of such issues that is required for a good description of political competition affects how we think substantively about the underlying political space in which parties compete. For this reason a great deal of activity in political science consists of estimating such configurations in particular real settings. We focus on three main issues in this article. First, we discuss the nature of political differences …
Adaptability In Socio-Political Contexts: Moving Beyond Ability And Intelligence, Singapore Management University
Adaptability In Socio-Political Contexts: Moving Beyond Ability And Intelligence, Singapore Management University
Perspectives@SMU
The ability to adapt in an ever-changing environment is critical for success, if not, survival. Most people would acknowledge that change management can sometimes be a discomforting and bumpy process. This applies not just with individuals and organisations, but also with governments. While the former two may adapt privately, governments, represented by politicians and public officers, often have the unenviable task of demonstrating adaptability under the watchful eyes of their public. Slip-ups, trips and falls thus come at greater costs, which go well beyond mere embarrassment.
From Boardroom To Parliament, Singapore Management University
From Boardroom To Parliament, Singapore Management University
Perspectives@SMU
Everyone has different motivations for working, . But the primary incentive for slogging it out in the corporate jungle would be money— at least that is what employers believe. This helps explain why companies are often willing to shell out wads of cash to outbid one another in the labour market for top executives.