Undergraduate Research Support
Academic Year 2023-2024
Skyler Cranmer. "Causes and consequences of Public Figures Facing Military Defeat"
Summary. The last 20 years have seen the U.S. start, fight, and lose two major wars. This project seeks to understand how political elites discussed the stalemate and ends of these conflicts when facing the public. A variety of actor types---e.g., journalists, pundits, special interests, elected officials, military leaders, and more--act and interact to shape the public's view the conflicts. As wars go badly, these different actors tend to produce noticeably different narratives. These diverging narratives tend to polarize and cluster as they compete to dominate the public sphere. The proposed research is a component of a broader research agenda that aims to model these dynamics and the extent to (a) which elites engaged shifted positions and polarized during the ends of the conflicts, (b) responded to, reacted, and led each other, and (c) strategically framed their positions. The literature has yet to understand how unelected public figures shape the public narrative and opinion, particularly during political crises such as failed wars; this broad agenda will help close that gap.
(3 undergraduate RAs)Ju Yeon Park. "Polarization in U.S. Politics" and "Identifying Interest Groups"
Polarization in U.S. politics has progressed over the past five decades to the point where citizens cannot agree on simple facts. While many studies have examined various institutional factors that contributed to polarization, communicative aspects of polarization have received relatively less attention. This project focuses on the evolution of elite discourse as a potential amplifier of polarization in the public’s understanding of policy issues. Using a cutting-edge AI-based text analysis method, my recent research introduced a new measure, the “grandstanding score,” that captures the intensity of political messages contained in legislators’ public speeches made in congressional committee hearings. Undergraduate research assistants who will help with cleaning the committee hearing transcript data.
To facilitate comprehensive research on interest group politics, the second projects aims to merge multiple datasets on interest groups and generate a unique identifier for each group which is absent in the scholarship (something analogous to ICPSR IDs for members of Congress) to generate a master data on interest groups to understand the universe of groups engaging in any type of advocacy behavior.
(Up to 10 undergraduate RAs).Janet Box-Steffensmeier. "The Supply Side of the U.S. Supreme Court Docket"
We know a lot about the U.S. Supreme Court cases chosen. We know a lot less about the potential cases, re: the writs of certiorari. This study enhances existing theories of judicial behavior by introducing an exhaustive dataset on writs of certiorari, facilitating novel supply-side inquiries made possible through the application of machine learning into classical themes: 1) how does the supply of cert petitions shape the justices’ agenda-setting behavior; 2) how do external actors, such as interest groups and the media, shape the Court’s docket; and 3) how does the Court’s selection of petitions granted review represent the plurality of public interests? Large language models (LLMs) will be used to classify the substantive and legal issues involved in the cases.Tom Nelson. "Connecting Values to Politics"
Socio-political values like freedom , individualism , and humanitarianism are essential ingredients to public opinion. Individuals support candidates and policy proposals in part because they perceive those political objects as upholding or advancing values that they care about. Unlike attitudes, which
vary from positive to negative in valence, values like freedom are appealing to almost all people. The near-universal positivity of values, combined with their centrality to political evaluation, makes values tempting targets for political entrepreneurs determined to shape public opinion in their favor. Political
entrepreneurs recruit values by asserting that their policy or program will promote a treasured value, thus burnishing that policy or program in the eyes of the public. In essence, value recruitment amounts to shaping the meaning of values. Investigating the strategic manipulation of value meanings can be accomplished through automated text analysis. The analysis of word embeddings is an exciting new development in text analysis that is perfectly suited to
measuring how the meaning of words varies between groups and over time.
As the above examples imply, our current research analyzes values in communication about the environment. Our corpus is the Congressional Record . While this method holds promise, it is clear that this corpus is not suitable for issues that have appeared infrequently in congressional debate. To analyze
such issues requires collecting, compiling, and in some cases digitizing, documents from diverse sources such as speeches, press releases, newspaper articles, websites, blogs, newsletters, and others. This is a big task, and we therefore seek support to hire undergraduate assistants to assemble our homegrown corpora.