U.S. Treaty Making with American Indians: Institutional Change and Relative Power, 1784–1911

Despite the popularity of unsupervised techniques for political science text-as-data research, the importance and implications of preprocessing decisions in this domain have received scant systematic attention. Yet, as we show, such decisions have profound effects on the results of real models for real data. We argue that substantive theory is typically too vague to be of use for feature selection, and that the supervised literature is not necessarily a helpful source of advice. To aid researchers working in unsupervised settings, we introduce a statistical procedure and software that examines the sensitivity of findings under alternate preprocessing regimes. This approach complements a researcher's substantive understanding of a problem by providing a characterization of the variability changes in preprocessing choices may induce when analyzing a particular dataset. In making scholars aware of the degree to which their results are likely to be sensitive to their preprocessing decisions, it aids replication efforts.preText software available: github.com/matthewjdenny/preText Word count: 10461 (excluding online appendices)

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“…The as described by Spirling (2012). We then make use of a sample of 1,000 Senate press releases originally compiled by Grimmer (2010).…”

Section: Description Of Datasets Used In Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Text Preprocessing For Unsupervised Learning: Why It Matters, When It Misleads, And What To Do About It

Denny¹,

Spirling²

2018

Polit. Anal.

Self Cite

315

151

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“…Yet in other cases, which can sometimes be the most interesting and valuable, scholars can build new, custom collections via web-scraping, optical character recognition, and other means for digitizing data that may not yet be readily available. For example, Spirling (2011) digitized all tribal treaties from 1784 to 1911, and coded them using sophisticated word-use methods, providing new insight into political dynamics between the tribes and the United States government. With regard to historical texts, the written record in the US West is likely less comprehensive and less formalized than in other regions, and thus building such custom text collections for western research may be all the more necessary and important.…”

Section: State Of the Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social scientific research on the American West: current debates, novel methods, and new directions

Burow

McConnell

Farrell

2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Reviewing recent social science research on the western United States from multiple disciplines, we present a state-of-the-art synthesis for scholars and policymakers focused on the socioecological future of this distinctive region. We address four core topics: (1) Migration and population change, focusing on the movements of people across the US West, and the ways that these population shifts are both shaped by and shaping the rise of 'New West' economies.(2) Environmental governance, synthesizing work on non-federal government institutions' interactions with the environment, including local/regional government agencies, Indigenous nations, and non-governmental organizations-all of which shape environmental quality and resource access for communities. (3) Place, culture, and belonging, which concerns how people find meaning in their environment and locate their sense of place in the region given changing social and natural landscapes. (4) Research methodologies, with a specific focus on blending cutting-edge machine learning, and social network approaches with well-established ethnographic, demographic, and survey-based methods. We then map out a future interdisciplinary agenda for the policy-relevant study of social and environmental change in the US West. Our approach stresses the importance of mixed method social research and a robust understanding of how culture, values, and identities intersect with ecological changes on landscapes to shape the well-being of people and ecosystems.

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“…Recent developments in automated content analysis and natural language processing (see e.g. Hopkins and King, 2010;Grimmer and King, 2011;Spirling, 2012;King, Pan, and Roberts, 2013) offers an opportunity to bridge this gap. The logic behind supervised learning variants of automated content analysis is to (i) build the corpus of relevant texts, (ii) hand-code a small subset of them based on particular categories of interest, and (iii) employ the subset as a training dataset based on which the remaining texts are coded.…”

Section: Textual Analysis Of Leaders' Speechesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resolve in International Politics

Kertzer¹

2016

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Why do some leaders and segments of the public display remarkable persistence in confrontations in international politics, while others cut and run? The answer given by policymakers, pundits, and political scientists usually relates to issues of resolve. Yet, though we rely on resolve to explain almost every phenomenon in international politics—from prevailing at the bargaining table to winning on the battlefield—we don't understand what it is, how it works, or where it comes from. This book draws on a growing body of research in psychology and behavioral economics to explore the foundations of this important idea. It argues that political will is more than just a metaphor or figure of speech: the same traits that social scientists and decision-making scholars use to comprehend willpower in our daily lives also shape how we respond to the costs of war and conflict. The book shows how time and risk preferences, honor orientation, and self-control help explain the ways by which leaders and members of the public define the situations they face and weigh the trade-offs between the costs of fighting and the costs of backing down. Offering a novel in-depth look at how willpower functions in international relations, the book has critical implications for understanding political psychology, public opinion about foreign policy, leaders in military interventions, and international security.

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U.S. Treaty Making with American Indians: Institutional Change and Relative Power, 1784–1911

Cited by 67 publications

References 26 publications

Text Preprocessing For Unsupervised Learning: Why It Matters, When It Misleads, And What To Do About It

Text Preprocessing For Unsupervised Learning: Why It Matters, When It Misleads, And What To Do About It

Social scientific research on the American West: current debates, novel methods, and new directions

Resolve in International Politics

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