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Articles 31 - 48 of 48
Full-Text Articles in Models and Methods
Scaling Policy Preferences From Coded Political Texts, Will Lowe, Kenneth Benoit, Slava Mikhaylov, Michael Laver
Scaling Policy Preferences From Coded Political Texts, Will Lowe, Kenneth Benoit, Slava Mikhaylov, Michael Laver
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Scholars estimating policy positions from political texts typically code words or sentences and then build left-right policy scales based on the relative frequencies of text units coded into different categories. Here we reexamine such scales and propose a theoretically and linguistically superior alternative based on the logarithm of odds-ratios. We contrast this scale with the current approach of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), showing that our proposed logit scale avoids widely acknowledged flaws in previous approaches. We validate the new scale using independent expert surveys. Using existing CMP data, we show how to estimate more distinct policy dimensions, for more …
Challenges For Estimating Policy Preferences: Announcing An Open Access Archive Of Political Documents, Kenneth Benoit, Thomas Brauninger, Marc Debus
Challenges For Estimating Policy Preferences: Announcing An Open Access Archive Of Political Documents, Kenneth Benoit, Thomas Brauninger, Marc Debus
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
We provide a comparative perspective on the contributions of the special issue with regard to their applied methods and findings. In addition, we discuss problems that arise when using ‘wrong’ or at least ‘incorrect’ versions of election manifestos by presenting replications of estimated policy positions of German parties. We show that the latter can result in biased estimates that may affect the outcome of theoretical models. On the basis of those findings, we present the idea of the open access archive polidoc.net to build up a common database for political texts.
Treating Words As Data With Error: Uncertainty In Text Statements Of Policy Positions, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver, Slava Mikhaylov
Treating Words As Data With Error: Uncertainty In Text Statements Of Policy Positions, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver, Slava Mikhaylov
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Political text offers extraordinary potential as a source of information about the policy positions of political actors. Despite recent advances in computational text analysis, human interpretative coding of text remains an important source of text-based data, ultimately required to validate more automatic techniques. The profession's main source of cross-national, time-series data on party policy positions comes from the human interpretative coding of party manifestos by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP). Despite widespread use of these data, the uncertainty associated with each point estimate has never been available, undermining the value of the dataset as a scientific resource. We propose a …
Of Government, Innovation And The Social Sector: An Interview With Ngiam Tong Dow, Tong Dow Ngiam
Of Government, Innovation And The Social Sector: An Interview With Ngiam Tong Dow, Tong Dow Ngiam
Social Space
With homelessness and unemployment looming large in the 1960s, the pioneer public service team turned the situation around within a span of 10 years. Veteran civil servant Ngiam Tong Dow shares his insights from the days of coming nose-to-nose with social breakdown – a time when creative resourcefulness was the only option. Retired and with the benefit of hindsight, he shares with Social Space his thoughts on innovation, government and the way forward for the social sector.
Benchmarks For Text Analysis: A Response To Budge And Pennings, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver
Benchmarks For Text Analysis: A Response To Budge And Pennings, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Budge and Pennings (2007) criticize the “Wordscores” method for computerized content analysis on essentially two grounds. The first is that the best test of Wordscores accuracy is whether it can “reproduce the rich time series produced by the MRG/CMP covering a 50 year period” (Budge and Pennings, 2007: 5), which Budge and Pennings claim it does not do. The second is that Wordscores time series estimates, as implemented by Budge and Pennings, yield very little variation around mean scores for the entire time series. In this brief response we make three simple points.
Estimating Party Policy Positions: Comparing Expert Surveys And Hand-Coded Content Analysis, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver
Estimating Party Policy Positions: Comparing Expert Surveys And Hand-Coded Content Analysis, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
In this paper we compare estimates of the left-right positions of political parties derived from an expert survey recently completed by the authors with those derived by the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) from the content analysis of party manifestos. Having briefly described the expert survey, we first explore the substantive policy content of left and right in the expert survey estimates. We then compare the expert survey to the CMP method on methodological grounds. Third, we directly compare the expert survey results to the CMP results for the most recent time period available, revealing some agreement but also numerous inconsistencies …
Who? Whom? Reparations And The Problem Of Agency, Chandran Kukathas
Who? Whom? Reparations And The Problem Of Agency, Chandran Kukathas
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
If a person is wronged, whether by a physical violation of his person or by having his property unjustly taken, or even by the besmirching of his reputation, he is, most people agree, entitled to some form of compensation or restitution from the person or persons responsible for the wrong. What form the reparation should take, and how great it should be, are sometimes difficult problems, but this does not change the fact that something is owed and someone must be held to account. If a restaurant goes bust because a supplier fails to fulfill his commitments and a newspaper …
Multiparty Split-Ticket Voting Estimation As An Ecological Inference Problem, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver, Daniela Giannetti
Multiparty Split-Ticket Voting Estimation As An Ecological Inference Problem, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver, Daniela Giannetti
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The estimation of vote splitting in mixed-member electoral systems is a common problem in electoral studies, where the goal of researchers is to estimate individual voter transitions between parties on two different ballots cast simultaneously. Because the ballots are cast separately and secretly, however, voter choice on the two ballots must be recreated from separately tabulated aggregate data. The problem is therefore of one of making ecological inferences. Because of the multiparty contexts normally found where mixed-member electoral rules are used, furthermore, the problem involves large-table (R × C) ecological inference. In this chapter we show how vote-splitting problems in …
Extracting Policy Positions From Political Texts Using Words As Data, Michael Laver, Kenneth Benoit, John Garry
Extracting Policy Positions From Political Texts Using Words As Data, Michael Laver, Kenneth Benoit, John Garry
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
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 dimensions. We “export” the method to a non-English-language environment, analyzing the policy positions of German parties, including the PDS as it entered the former West German party system. Finally, we extend its application beyond …
Estimating Irish Party Policy Positions Using Computer Wordscoring: The 2002 Election: A Research Note, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver
Estimating Irish Party Policy Positions Using Computer Wordscoring: The 2002 Election: A Research Note, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Developments in the computerised analysis of political texts now make itmuch easier than before to investigate large volumes of political text inorder to estimate the policy positions of the authors. Previous contentanalyses of party manifestos, for example, have relied on the hand codingof texts (Budge et al., 1987; Laver and Budge, 1992; Klingeman et al.,1994; Budge et al., 2001), or on dictionary-based computer codingtechniques (Laver and Garry, 2000; Kleinnijenhuis and Pennings, 2001;Garry, 2001; de Vries et al., 2001; Bara, 2001). Such analyses, even thosebased on computer coding dictionaries, require heavy human involvement or intervention, creating both a huge resource cost …
The Endogeneity Problem In Electoral Studies: A Critical Re-Examination Of Duverger's Mechanical Effect, Kenneth Benoit
The Endogeneity Problem In Electoral Studies: A Critical Re-Examination Of Duverger's Mechanical Effect, Kenneth Benoit
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Studies of electoral law consequences typically treat electoral laws as exogenous factors affecting political party systems, even while acknowledging that political parties often tailor electoral institutions to suit their own distributional needs. This study represents a departure from that approach, directly examining one aspect of the endogeneity of electoral systems: the endogeneity of Duverger's ‘mechanical’ effect. Theory clearly posits that the Duvergerian ‘psychological’ effect of electoral rules occurs in anticipation of their reductive mechanical effect, yet in empirical models this endogenous character is typically ignored. In this paper I formalize the two types of Duvergerian effects of electoral laws in …
Locating Tds In Policy Spaces: The Computational Text Analysis Of Dáil Speeches, Michael Laver, Kenneth Benoit
Locating Tds In Policy Spaces: The Computational Text Analysis Of Dáil Speeches, Michael Laver, Kenneth Benoit
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This article adapts a new technique for the computerised analysis of political texts, previously used to analyse party manifestos, to the analysis of speeches made in a legislature. The benefits of computerised text analysis come from the ability to analyse, for the first time, complex and daunting electronic sources of text, such as the parliamentary record. This allows the systematic estimation of the policy positions of individual political actors, with huge benefits both for theory development and empirical analysis. In this article, the technique is used to analyse all 58 English language speeches made in the October 1991 confidence debate …
Can A Liberal Society Tolerate Illiberal Elements?, Chandran Kukathas
Can A Liberal Society Tolerate Illiberal Elements?, Chandran Kukathas
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Libertarians believe that all individuals are entitledto live as they choose, free from interference byother persons or by the state. They also believethat in the absence of such interference, whether bygovernment or other agents of the state intent ondesigning or planning for society as a whole, order willnonetheless prevail. Given the freedom to contract andexchange, markets will coordinate the production anddistribution of goods — and indeed do so better thanany other institution can.
The Asian Way And Modern Liberalism: A Hayekian Perspective, Chandran Kukathas
The Asian Way And Modern Liberalism: A Hayekian Perspective, Chandran Kukathas
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
F.A. Hayek was a European economist and socialphilosopher who first came to scholarly prominencefor his work on trade cycles and his disagreementswith John Maynard Keynes; and who earned widerintellectual notice (if not notoriety) for hispolemics warning of the threat to westerncivilisation posed by modern socialism. Hiseconomic writings in the 1930s aimed,more than anything, at exposing the flawsand contradictions in socialism as aneconomic system. His polemic, The Roadto Serfdom, published in 1944 with adedication to ‘The Socialists of All Parties’,was an attempt to turn around the thinkingof western policy-makers he thought tooeasily seduced by the claims of centraleconomic planning. And his …
Liberalism And Multiculturalism: The Politics Of Indifference, Chandran Kukathas
Liberalism And Multiculturalism: The Politics Of Indifference, Chandran Kukathas
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
In modern societies, particularly the societies of the liberal democratic West, cultural diversity poses a challenge not only to the makers of government policy, but also to the philosopher looking to understand how it might be possible-in principle-for people of different ways to live together. The challenge is posed because society's institutions have been challenged, as the members of different groups have demanded "recognition." They have demanded not simply recognition of their claims to a (just) share of the social pie but, more important, recognition of their distinct identities as members of particular cultural communities within society. The persistence and, …
A Preview Of Ei And Ezi: Programs For Ecological Inference, Kenneth Benoit, Gary King
A Preview Of Ei And Ezi: Programs For Ecological Inference, Kenneth Benoit, Gary King
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Ecological inference, as traditionally defined, is the process of using aggregate (i.e., ecological) data to infer discrete individual-level relationships of interest when individual-level data are not available. Existing methods of ecological inference generate very inaccurate conclusions about the empirical world- which thus gives rise to the ecological inference problem. Most scholars who analyze aggregate data routinely encounter some form of this problem. EI (by Gary King) and EzI (by Kenneth Benoit and Gary King) are freely available software that implement the statistical and graphical methods detailed in Gary King's book A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem. These methods make …
Democracies Really Are More Pacific (In General): Reexamining Regime Type And War Involvement, Kenneth Benoit
Democracies Really Are More Pacific (In General): Reexamining Regime Type And War Involvement, Kenneth Benoit
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Current consensus in the field of democratic peace research holds that democratic states go to war in general no less than nondemocratic states. The author challenges this consensus by reevaluating the main empirical studies on which it rests, using information that previous studies ignored and statistical techniques unused or even unknown at the time. The results indicate that from 1960 to 1980, democratic nations were less involved in military conflict than other regime types. Estimates of this relationship are robust to different operational definitions of both war and democracy, to the addition of control variables for other possible correlates of …
Conservatism, Liberalism And Ideology, Chandran Kukathas
Conservatism, Liberalism And Ideology, Chandran Kukathas
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
All societies are more or less complex systems of rules, of symbols andsigns directing and constraining individual behavior. The task of thesocial theorist is to analyze and uncover what order may underlie suchstructures. In this regard he faces at least two major problems. First, hehas to determine how far the rules or norms which govern human action define the distribution of power, responsibility and resources, andso determine the relative value placed upon such goods as education, art and scientific inquiry, and how far the existing structure of distribution of power and resources is itself responsible for the prevalence ofparticular rules. …