Comparing computational and non-computational methods in party position estimation: Finland, 2003–2019

Koljonen, Juha; Isotalo, Veikko; Ahonen, Pertti; Mattila, Mikko

doi:10.1177/1354068820974609

Cited by 4 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 40 publications

(81 reference statements)

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“…Wordscores was developed in political science to infer ideologies from manifestoes. In a recent study of political parties’ positions, this programme was found to outperform another computational tool, Wordfish, which correlated less closely with non-computational methods and required a very large amount of data for calibration (Koljonen et al, 2022).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantitative Textual Analysis as a means to explore corporate interests in food safety

Reeves

2023

Health (London)

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The growing body of scholarship on the commercial determinants of health has, so far, mostly employed qualitative methods but this is now being complemented by a small, yet growing, corpus of quantitative studies. We illustrate the use of one such method, quantitative text analysis (QTA), in a case study of submissions to a public consultation on a draft scientific opinion by the European Food Safety Authority on the chemical acrylamide, demonstrating how this method can be used and insights that might be drawn from it. We use Wordscores as one example of QTA to illuminate the diverse positions taken by actors submitting comments and then assess whether the final policy documents moved towards or away from the positions taken by different stakeholders. We find a broadly uniform position among the public health community, opposed to acrylamide, contrasting with industry positions that were not monolithic. Some firms recommended major amendments to the guidance, largely reflecting the impact on their practices, while policy innovators seeking ways to reduce acrylamide in foods aligned with the public health community. We also find no clear movement in the policy guidance, likely because most submissions supported the draft document. Many governments are required to conduct public consultations, some attracting enormous numbers of responses, with little guidance on how best to synthesise the responses so the default position is often a count of those for and against. We argue that QTA, primarily a research tool, might usefully be applied in analysing public consultation responses to understand better the positions taken by different actors.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantitative Textual Analysis as a means to explore corporate interests in food safety

Reeves

2023

Health (London)

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“…They are widely considered a convenient and sufficiently valid source of revealed party positions (Ruedin and Morales, 2019). Manifestos can be analysed either manually or through automated approaches, which is ultimately a choice between reliability and validity (Koljonen et al, 2020). In this case, I opted for a manual coder approach since the task carried out here is oriented toward uncovering meanings and interpreting arguments.…”

Section: Research Design Data and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identity, money, or governance? Explaining secessionist parties’ rhetorical strategies

Ferreira

2022

Party Politics

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Under what conditions do secessionist parties advance identity, socioeconomic or political frames for constitutional change? By performing a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of 93 party manifestos from six Western regions, the results identify a key variable that plays an important role in rhetorical strategies: the governmental status of the party. In linguistically distinctive regions, parties tend to put forward identity frames when in opposition. Instead, being in office is a condition for framing their position in socioeconomic terms. The results concerning political frames are highly complex, although patterns around office holding have also been identified. Hence, the present article shows that office-seeking strategies imply a fundamental change in how these parties frame their claims. Minority nationalist parties take the opportunity of being in office to enhance their credibility as governing parties by downplaying identity issues in favour of a more inclusive and policy-oriented appeal.

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“…There is a long research tradition in political science that focuses on estimating policy or ideological positions of political parties from political texts on a common scale (e.g., Koljonen et al, 2020;Lowe et al, 2011). This line of research on is typically focused on the spatial positions of the political parties on a left-right dimension or a liberal-conservative dimension, the assumption being that "a set of party positions, whether a cross-section or a time series, can be located on some (continuously defined) metric scale" (Lowe et al, 2011, p. 125).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…The most used data source on the policy positions of different political actors, cross-sectionally and longitudinally, is text (Lowe et al, 2011). Policy positions are latent variables that cannot be directly observed from texts (Koljonen et al, 2020).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Gambling revenue is distributed to a wide array of beneficiaries, the state included. Over the past few years, the media, citizens, researchers, politicians and other stakeholders have increasingly started to criticise the marketing and other practices of Veikkaus, and in light of the apparent interest of the state and other stakeholders in gambling revenue, to question the official justification of the regulatory framework (e.g., Lakka, 2019 ; Rämö, 2018 ; YLE, 2020 ). Moreover, a previous study ( Lerkkanen & Marionneau, 2019 ) shows an upward trend in the number of articles on gambling and gambling harm in the biggest Finnish daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat .…”

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confidence: 99%

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Gambling policy positions of Finnish newspapers between 2004 and 2020: An automated content analysis

Selin

Nyrhinen

2022

Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs

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Aims: The media can influence gambling policy formation and public opinion. Previous research has established that the tension between political or public interest in gambling revenue and gambling harm is fundamental for understanding gambling policy. There are two opposing gambling policy positions: (1) gambling revenue or the economic benefits of gambling, and (2) the harmful impacts of gambling. This study is the first study to estimate these gambling policy positions of newspapers on a common scale. The objective is to estimate how the gambling policy positions of major Finnish daily newspapers evolved between 2004 and 2020. This knowledge deepens our understanding about the changes in the relative balance between harm and revenue in gambling policy. Methods and data: The data consisted of newspaper editorials ( N = 58) on gambling policy from five major Finnish daily newspapers between 2004 and 2020. The data were analysed with the automated content analysis algorithm Wordfish. Results: The results show that there has been a clear shift in the gambling policy positions of the major Finnish newspapers towards increased acknowledgement of the importance of prevention and reduction of gambling harm. Conclusions: Due to the interplay between the media, politics, and the public, it is likely that the importance of prevention and reduction of gambling harm will be recognised and addressed to a larger extent when gambling policy is formulated in Finland in the future. More generally, if the gambling policy positions of media and other stakeholders change, this can facilitate a promotion of harm prevention policies.

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Comparing computational and non-computational methods in party position estimation: Finland, 2003–2019

Cited by 4 publications

References 40 publications

Quantitative Textual Analysis as a means to explore corporate interests in food safety

Quantitative Textual Analysis as a means to explore corporate interests in food safety

Identity, money, or governance? Explaining secessionist parties’ rhetorical strategies

Gambling policy positions of Finnish newspapers between 2004 and 2020: An automated content analysis

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