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Computer-Assisted Text Analysis for Comparative Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Christopher Lucas ,
Richard A. Nielsen ,
Margaret E. Roberts ,
Brandon M. Stewart ,
Alex Storer  and
Dustin Tingley
Christopher Lucas
Affiliation:
Department of Government and Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, 1737 Cambridge St., Cambridge MA 02138, USA, e-mail: clucas@fas.harvard.edu
Richard A. Nielsen
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139, USA, e-mail: rnielsen@mit.edu
Margaret E. Roberts
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, #0521 La Jolla, CA 92093, USA, e-mail: meroberts@ucsd.edu
Brandon M. Stewart
Affiliation:
Department of Government and Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA, e-mail: bstewart@fas.harvard.edu
Alex Storer
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, 655 Knight Way, Stanford, CA 94305, USA, e-mail: astorer@stanford.edu
Dustin Tingley*
Affiliation:
Department of Government and Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, 1737 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
*
e-mail: dtingley@gov.harvard.edu (corresponding author)
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Abstract

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Recent advances in research tools for the systematic analysis of textual data are enabling exciting new research throughout the social sciences. For comparative politics, scholars who are often interested in non-English and possibly multilingual textual datasets, these advances may be difficult to access. This article discusses practical issues that arise in the processing, management, translation, and analysis of textual data with a particular focus on how procedures differ across languages. These procedures are combined in two applied examples of automated text analysis using the recently introduced Structural Topic Model. We also show how the model can be used to analyze data that have been translated into a single language via machine translation tools. All the methods we describe here are implemented in open-source software packages available from the authors.

Type
Articles
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , Spring 2015 , pp. 254 - 277
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

Footnotes

Authors' note: Our thanks to Sam Brotherton and Jetson Leder-Luis for research assistance and Amy Catilinac for discussion about text analyses in comparative politics. We also thank Christopher Blattman, Dan Corstange, Macartan Humphreys, Amaney Jamal, Gary King, Helen Milner, Tamar Mitts, Brendan O’Connor, Arthur Spirling, and the Columbia University Comparative Politics Workshop for comments. Our software discussed in this article is open source and available.

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