Amber E Boydstun
Biographic Data
| ID | 2335944 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Amber E Boydstun |
| GIVEN NAMES | Amber E |
| FAMILY NAME | Boydstun |
| SIGNATURE | BOYDSTUN A E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Davis |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6012-8055 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 397 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Do Political Discussion Partners Share Policy Priorities and Policy Frames?
To understand politics, people often rely on political discussion. Among the many ways that discussion may shape political perceptions, one possible mechanism is by promoting a shared sense of priorities— which issues are important. A second mechanism is by framing how people think about important issues. We examine these potential mechanisms by answering the descriptive question: Do policy priorities and policy frames tend to co-occur within pol…
Our Issue Positions are Strong, and Our Opponents’ Valence is Weak: An Analysis of Parties' Campaign Strategies in Ten Western European Democracies
Political parties face strategic decisions about whether to campaign on issue-based appeals , pertaining to debates over such issues as economic, immigration, and environmental policies, versus valence-based appeals , emphasizing leadership attributes, such as character (integrity, honesty, and so on), along with performance, that is, the ability to deliver positive outcomes. To better understand these choices, we analyze parties' national electi…
Self-coding: A method to assess semantic validity and bias when coding open-ended responses
Open-ended survey questions can provide researchers with nuanced and rich data, but content analysis is subject to misinterpretation and can introduce bias into subsequent analysis. We present a simple method to improve the semantic validity of a codebook and test for bias: a “self-coding” method where respondents first provide open-ended responses and then self-code those responses into categories. We demonstrated this method by comparing respon…
Automated Text Classification of News Articles: A Practical Guide
Automated text analysis methods have made possible the classification of large corpora of text by measures such as topic and tone. Here, we provide a guide to help researchers navigate the consequential decisions they need to make before any measure can be produced from the text. We consider, both theoretically and empirically, the effects of such choices using as a running example efforts to measure the tone ofNew York Timescoverage of the econo…
When Celebrity and Political Journalism Collide: Reporting Standards, Entertainment, and the Conundrum of Covering Donald Trump’s 2016 Campaign
While the rise of celebrities-turned-politicians has been well documented and theorized, how their bids for office are treated by the establishment press has been less closely examined. Research on celebrity politics on the one hand, and on journalism standards on the other, have rarely been brought into conversation with one another. Here, we draw from both literatures to explore how the press covered Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. P…
Etch-a-Sketching: Evaluating the Post-Primary Rhetorical Moderation Hypothesis
Candidates have incentives to present themselves as strong partisans in primary elections, and then move “toward the center” upon advancing to the general election. Yet, candidates also face incentives not to flip-flop on their policy positions. These competing incentives suggest that candidates might use rhetoric to seem more partisan in the primary and more moderate in the general, even if their policy positions remain fixed. We test this idea …
A Negativity Bias in Reframing Shapes Political Preferences Even in Partisan Contexts
Humans evolved to attend to valence and group membership when learning about their environment. The political domain offers a unique opportunity to study the simultaneous influence of these two broad, domain-general features of human experience. We examined whether the pervasive tendency for negatively valenced frames to “stick” in the mind applies to both intergroup and intragroup political contexts. In a preregistered experiment, we tested the …
Framing, identity, and responsibility: Do episodic vs. thematic framing effects vary by target population
Extensive political communication research shows that people respond differently to the same policy problem depending on how it is portrayed, or “framed.” Specifically, Iyengar [1991]. Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press] finds that when news coverage about a policy issue is framed episodically, citizens tend to attribute responsibility to the individual, whereas when news is framed…
In the wake of a terrorist attack, do Americans’ attitudes toward Muslims decline
When a terrorist attack occurs, a natural response may be increased public concern about terrorism. But when a self-described Muslim perpetrates a terrorist attack, do negative attitudes toward Muslims also increase? If so, is this effect conditional on the nature of people’s past personal experiences with Muslims? We present natural experiment data based on a 2015 web-based survey of 2105 non-Muslims in the US, a survey that happened to span the…
Assessing the Relationship between Economic News Coverage and Mass Economic Attitudes
Do economic performance and economic news coverage influence public perceptions of the economy? Efforts to assess the effects are hampered by the interrelationships among the variables. In this paper, we bring to bear a more careful accounting of available economic variables than previous studies have used. We find that both media tone and economic attitudes are strongly related to actual economic performance. Moreover, after taking into account …
The Nonlinear Effect of Information on Political Attention: Media Storms and U.S. Congressional Hearings
Agenda-setting scholars have claimed that the typical punctuated pattern of governmental attention is a consequence of disproportionate information processing. Yet these claims remain unsubstantiated. We tackle this challenge by considering mass media coverage as a source of information for political actors and by examining the relationship between preceding media information and subsequent governmental attention. Employing data capturing U.S. me…
What We Should Really Be Asking About Media Attention to Trump
In her piece for the November 2016 issue of The Forum, “How the News Media Helped to Nominate Trump,” Julia Azari contends that the media played a crucial coordination function for Donald Trump’s r
Women Also Know Stuff: Meta-Level Mentoring to Battle Gender Bias in Political Science
Women know stuff. Yet, all too often, they are underrepresented in political science meetings, syllabi, and editorial boards. To counter the implicit bias that leads to women’s underrepresentation, to ensure that women’s expertise is included and shared, and to improve the visibility of women in political science, in February 2016 we launched the “Women Also Know Stuff” initiative, which features a crowd-sourced website and an active Twitter feed…
After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment , by Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini
My guess is that most media scholars have shared some version of the following experience: A fellow airplane passenger asks you what you do. Perhaps you dodge the question, or lie outright, saying
Colleague Crowdsourcing: A Method for Fostering National Student Engagement and Large-N Data Collection
Scholars often rely on student samples from their own campuses to study political behavior, but some studies require larger and more diverse samples than any single campus can provide. In our case, we wanted to study the real-time effects of presidential debates on individual-level attitudes, and we sought a large sample with diversity across covariates such as ideology and race. To address this challenge, we recruited college students across the…
Two Faces of Media Attention: Media Storm Versus Non-Storm Coverage
A media storm is a sudden surge in news coverage of an item, producing high attention for a sustained period. Our study represents the first multi-issue, quantitative analysis of storm behavior. We build a theory of the mechanisms that drive media storms and why the "anatomy" of media storms differs from that of non-storm coverage. Specifically, media storm coverage should change less explosively over time, but be more sharply skewed across issue…
Dominating the news: Government officials in front-page news coverage of policy issues in the United States and Korea
What determines which political actors dominate a country’s news? Understanding the forces that shape political actors’ news coverage matters, because these actors can influence which problems and alternatives receive a nation’s public and policy attention. Across free-press nations, the degree of media attention actors receive is rarely proportional to their degree of participation in the policymaking process. Yet, the nature of this “mis”-repre…
Real-Time Reactions to a 2012 Presidential Debate
How effective are presidential candidates at engaging viewers during debates? To answer this question, we designed a mobile app and conducted a large-scale national study of individual college students’ real-time reactions to the first general election debate of 2012. Previous studies have relied either on real-time but small-sample individual dial reactions or on large-scale public reactions to debates in their entirety, after the fact, and with…
The Importance of Attention Diversity and How to Measure It
Studies of political attention often focus on attention to a single issue, such as front‐page coverage of the economy. However, examining attention to a single issue without accounting for the agenda as a whole can lead to faulty assumptions. One solution is to consider the diversity of attention; that is, how narrowly or widely attention is distributed across items (e.g., issues on an agenda or, at a lower level, frames in an issue debate). Atte…
Making the News: Politics, the Media, and Agenda Setting
Agenda Control in the 2008 Presidential Debates
Research indicates that, when engaging their opponents, strategic candidates will draw (and redraw) lines of conflict, pulling attention to their advantaged topics. But do these expectations hold up in debates, where candidates are at the mercy of those asking the questions? And do strategic debate behaviors matter? This study draws on past literature to hypothesize the specific types of agenda-control behaviors we should see in debates. These hy…
Playing to the Crowd: Agenda Control in Presidential Debates
Presidential debates allow candidates to send a message directly to voters. We use an experimental design complemented with a content analysis of all presidential debates in 1992, 2004, and 2008 to explore how candidates should and do use agenda setting, framing, and message tone to shape the agenda in debates. We find that candidates are differentially attentive to various topics, depending on the comparative advantage provided by the topic. Yet…
A Two‐Tiered Method for Identifying Trends in Media Framing of Policy Issues: The Case of the War on Terror
Research on media framing of policy issues has flourished. Yet the varied approaches to conceptualizing and operationalizing issue frames that make this literature rich also hinder its advancement. Here, we document the benefits of a two‐tiered method: the first level accounts for issue‐specific frames, while the second level tracks frames that generalize across issues. For this study, we draw on generalizable frames from prospect theory (loss vs…
Going Maverick: How Candidates Can Use Agenda-Setting to Influence Citizen Motivations and Offset Unpopular Issue Positions
The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence
The Importance of Attention Diversity and How to Measure It
Studies of political attention often focus on attention to a single issue, such as front‐page coverage of the economy. However, examining attention to a single issue without accounting for the agenda as a whole can lead to faulty assumptions. One solution is to consider the diversity of attention; that is, how narrowly or widely attention is distributed across items (e.g., issues on an agenda or, at a lower level, frames in an issue debate). Atte…
Two Faces of Media Attention: Media Storm Versus Non-Storm Coverage
A media storm is a sudden surge in news coverage of an item, producing high attention for a sustained period. Our study represents the first multi-issue, quantitative analysis of storm behavior. We build a theory of the mechanisms that drive media storms and why the "anatomy" of media storms differs from that of non-storm coverage. Specifically, media storm coverage should change less explosively over time, but be more sharply skewed across issue…
Automated Text Classification of News Articles: A Practical Guide
Automated text analysis methods have made possible the classification of large corpora of text by measures such as topic and tone. Here, we provide a guide to help researchers navigate the consequential decisions they need to make before any measure can be produced from the text. We consider, both theoretically and empirically, the effects of such choices using as a running example efforts to measure the tone ofNew York Timescoverage of the econo…
The Nonlinear Effect of Information on Political Attention: Media Storms and U.S. Congressional Hearings
Agenda-setting scholars have claimed that the typical punctuated pattern of governmental attention is a consequence of disproportionate information processing. Yet these claims remain unsubstantiated. We tackle this challenge by considering mass media coverage as a source of information for political actors and by examining the relationship between preceding media information and subsequent governmental attention. Employing data capturing U.S. me…
What We Should Really Be Asking About Media Attention to Trump
In her piece for the November 2016 issue of The Forum, “How the News Media Helped to Nominate Trump,” Julia Azari contends that the media played a crucial coordination function for Donald Trump’s r
Real-Time Reactions to a 2012 Presidential Debate
How effective are presidential candidates at engaging viewers during debates? To answer this question, we designed a mobile app and conducted a large-scale national study of individual college students’ real-time reactions to the first general election debate of 2012. Previous studies have relied either on real-time but small-sample individual dial reactions or on large-scale public reactions to debates in their entirety, after the fact, and with…
A Two‐Tiered Method for Identifying Trends in Media Framing of Policy Issues: The Case of the War on Terror
Research on media framing of policy issues has flourished. Yet the varied approaches to conceptualizing and operationalizing issue frames that make this literature rich also hinder its advancement. Here, we document the benefits of a two‐tiered method: the first level accounts for issue‐specific frames, while the second level tracks frames that generalize across issues. For this study, we draw on generalizable frames from prospect theory (loss vs…
Assessing the Relationship between Economic News Coverage and Mass Economic Attitudes
Do economic performance and economic news coverage influence public perceptions of the economy? Efforts to assess the effects are hampered by the interrelationships among the variables. In this paper, we bring to bear a more careful accounting of available economic variables than previous studies have used. We find that both media tone and economic attitudes are strongly related to actual economic performance. Moreover, after taking into account …
Playing to the Crowd: Agenda Control in Presidential Debates
Presidential debates allow candidates to send a message directly to voters. We use an experimental design complemented with a content analysis of all presidential debates in 1992, 2004, and 2008 to explore how candidates should and do use agenda setting, framing, and message tone to shape the agenda in debates. We find that candidates are differentially attentive to various topics, depending on the comparative advantage provided by the topic. Yet…
Etch-a-Sketching: Evaluating the Post-Primary Rhetorical Moderation Hypothesis
Candidates have incentives to present themselves as strong partisans in primary elections, and then move “toward the center” upon advancing to the general election. Yet, candidates also face incentives not to flip-flop on their policy positions. These competing incentives suggest that candidates might use rhetoric to seem more partisan in the primary and more moderate in the general, even if their policy positions remain fixed. We test this idea …
Media Framing of Capital Punishment and Its Impact on Individuals' Cognitive Responses
It is well known that mass media have the ability to frame a sociopolitical issue in specific ways, which can have considerable impact on the public's thoughts and perceptions regarding the issue. Through analyzing coverage of capital punishment in the New York Times since 1960 and then conducting an experiment in which we assessed individual-level responses to differently framed news stories, we show (a) the dramatic emergence of a new “innocenc…
Our Issue Positions are Strong, and Our Opponents’ Valence is Weak: An Analysis of Parties' Campaign Strategies in Ten Western European Democracies
Political parties face strategic decisions about whether to campaign on issue-based appeals , pertaining to debates over such issues as economic, immigration, and environmental policies, versus valence-based appeals , emphasizing leadership attributes, such as character (integrity, honesty, and so on), along with performance, that is, the ability to deliver positive outcomes. To better understand these choices, we analyze parties' national electi…
In the wake of a terrorist attack, do Americans’ attitudes toward Muslims decline
When a terrorist attack occurs, a natural response may be increased public concern about terrorism. But when a self-described Muslim perpetrates a terrorist attack, do negative attitudes toward Muslims also increase? If so, is this effect conditional on the nature of people’s past personal experiences with Muslims? We present natural experiment data based on a 2015 web-based survey of 2105 non-Muslims in the US, a survey that happened to span the…
When Celebrity and Political Journalism Collide: Reporting Standards, Entertainment, and the Conundrum of Covering Donald Trump’s 2016 Campaign
While the rise of celebrities-turned-politicians has been well documented and theorized, how their bids for office are treated by the establishment press has been less closely examined. Research on celebrity politics on the one hand, and on journalism standards on the other, have rarely been brought into conversation with one another. Here, we draw from both literatures to explore how the press covered Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. P…
Framing, identity, and responsibility: Do episodic vs. thematic framing effects vary by target population
Extensive political communication research shows that people respond differently to the same policy problem depending on how it is portrayed, or “framed.” Specifically, Iyengar [1991]. Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press] finds that when news coverage about a policy issue is framed episodically, citizens tend to attribute responsibility to the individual, whereas when news is framed…
Agenda Control in the 2008 Presidential Debates
Research indicates that, when engaging their opponents, strategic candidates will draw (and redraw) lines of conflict, pulling attention to their advantaged topics. But do these expectations hold up in debates, where candidates are at the mercy of those asking the questions? And do strategic debate behaviors matter? This study draws on past literature to hypothesize the specific types of agenda-control behaviors we should see in debates. These hy…
Women Also Know Stuff: Meta-Level Mentoring to Battle Gender Bias in Political Science
Women know stuff. Yet, all too often, they are underrepresented in political science meetings, syllabi, and editorial boards. To counter the implicit bias that leads to women’s underrepresentation, to ensure that women’s expertise is included and shared, and to improve the visibility of women in political science, in February 2016 we launched the “Women Also Know Stuff” initiative, which features a crowd-sourced website and an active Twitter feed…
Colleague Crowdsourcing: A Method for Fostering National Student Engagement and Large-N Data Collection
Scholars often rely on student samples from their own campuses to study political behavior, but some studies require larger and more diverse samples than any single campus can provide. In our case, we wanted to study the real-time effects of presidential debates on individual-level attitudes, and we sought a large sample with diversity across covariates such as ideology and race. To address this challenge, we recruited college students across the…
Dominating the news: Government officials in front-page news coverage of policy issues in the United States and Korea
What determines which political actors dominate a country’s news? Understanding the forces that shape political actors’ news coverage matters, because these actors can influence which problems and alternatives receive a nation’s public and policy attention. Across free-press nations, the degree of media attention actors receive is rarely proportional to their degree of participation in the policymaking process. Yet, the nature of this “mis”-repre…
Going Maverick: How Candidates Can Use Agenda-Setting to Influence Citizen Motivations and Offset Unpopular Issue Positions
The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence
Since 1996, death sentences in America have declined by more than 60 percent, reversing a generation-long trend toward greater acceptance of capital punishment. In theory, most Americans continue to support the death penalty. But it is no longer seen as a theoretical matter. Prosecutors, judges, and juries across the country have moved in large numbers to give much greater credence to the possibility of mistakes - mistakes that in this arena are …
The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence
Media Framing of Capital Punishment and Its Impact on Individuals' Cognitive Responses
It is well known that mass media have the ability to frame a sociopolitical issue in specific ways, which can have considerable impact on the public's thoughts and perceptions regarding the issue. Through analyzing coverage of capital punishment in the New York Times since 1960 and then conducting an experiment in which we assessed individual-level responses to differently framed news stories, we show (a) the dramatic emergence of a new “innocenc…
Going Maverick: How Candidates Can Use Agenda-Setting to Influence Citizen Motivations and Offset Unpopular Issue Positions
Making the News: Politics, the Media, and Agenda Setting
Agenda Control in the 2008 Presidential Debates
Research indicates that, when engaging their opponents, strategic candidates will draw (and redraw) lines of conflict, pulling attention to their advantaged topics. But do these expectations hold up in debates, where candidates are at the mercy of those asking the questions? And do strategic debate behaviors matter? This study draws on past literature to hypothesize the specific types of agenda-control behaviors we should see in debates. These hy…
Playing to the Crowd: Agenda Control in Presidential Debates
Presidential debates allow candidates to send a message directly to voters. We use an experimental design complemented with a content analysis of all presidential debates in 1992, 2004, and 2008 to explore how candidates should and do use agenda setting, framing, and message tone to shape the agenda in debates. We find that candidates are differentially attentive to various topics, depending on the comparative advantage provided by the topic. Yet…
A Two‐Tiered Method for Identifying Trends in Media Framing of Policy Issues: The Case of the War on Terror
Research on media framing of policy issues has flourished. Yet the varied approaches to conceptualizing and operationalizing issue frames that make this literature rich also hinder its advancement. Here, we document the benefits of a two‐tiered method: the first level accounts for issue‐specific frames, while the second level tracks frames that generalize across issues. For this study, we draw on generalizable frames from prospect theory (loss vs…
Colleague Crowdsourcing: A Method for Fostering National Student Engagement and Large-N Data Collection
Scholars often rely on student samples from their own campuses to study political behavior, but some studies require larger and more diverse samples than any single campus can provide. In our case, we wanted to study the real-time effects of presidential debates on individual-level attitudes, and we sought a large sample with diversity across covariates such as ideology and race. To address this challenge, we recruited college students across the…
Two Faces of Media Attention: Media Storm Versus Non-Storm Coverage
A media storm is a sudden surge in news coverage of an item, producing high attention for a sustained period. Our study represents the first multi-issue, quantitative analysis of storm behavior. We build a theory of the mechanisms that drive media storms and why the "anatomy" of media storms differs from that of non-storm coverage. Specifically, media storm coverage should change less explosively over time, but be more sharply skewed across issue…
Dominating the news: Government officials in front-page news coverage of policy issues in the United States and Korea
What determines which political actors dominate a country’s news? Understanding the forces that shape political actors’ news coverage matters, because these actors can influence which problems and alternatives receive a nation’s public and policy attention. Across free-press nations, the degree of media attention actors receive is rarely proportional to their degree of participation in the policymaking process. Yet, the nature of this “mis”-repre…
Real-Time Reactions to a 2012 Presidential Debate
How effective are presidential candidates at engaging viewers during debates? To answer this question, we designed a mobile app and conducted a large-scale national study of individual college students’ real-time reactions to the first general election debate of 2012. Previous studies have relied either on real-time but small-sample individual dial reactions or on large-scale public reactions to debates in their entirety, after the fact, and with…
The Importance of Attention Diversity and How to Measure It
Studies of political attention often focus on attention to a single issue, such as front‐page coverage of the economy. However, examining attention to a single issue without accounting for the agenda as a whole can lead to faulty assumptions. One solution is to consider the diversity of attention; that is, how narrowly or widely attention is distributed across items (e.g., issues on an agenda or, at a lower level, frames in an issue debate). Atte…
After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment , by Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini
My guess is that most media scholars have shared some version of the following experience: A fellow airplane passenger asks you what you do. Perhaps you dodge the question, or lie outright, saying
The Nonlinear Effect of Information on Political Attention: Media Storms and U.S. Congressional Hearings
Agenda-setting scholars have claimed that the typical punctuated pattern of governmental attention is a consequence of disproportionate information processing. Yet these claims remain unsubstantiated. We tackle this challenge by considering mass media coverage as a source of information for political actors and by examining the relationship between preceding media information and subsequent governmental attention. Employing data capturing U.S. me…
What We Should Really Be Asking About Media Attention to Trump
In her piece for the November 2016 issue of The Forum, “How the News Media Helped to Nominate Trump,” Julia Azari contends that the media played a crucial coordination function for Donald Trump’s r
Women Also Know Stuff: Meta-Level Mentoring to Battle Gender Bias in Political Science
Women know stuff. Yet, all too often, they are underrepresented in political science meetings, syllabi, and editorial boards. To counter the implicit bias that leads to women’s underrepresentation, to ensure that women’s expertise is included and shared, and to improve the visibility of women in political science, in February 2016 we launched the “Women Also Know Stuff” initiative, which features a crowd-sourced website and an active Twitter feed…
In the wake of a terrorist attack, do Americans’ attitudes toward Muslims decline
When a terrorist attack occurs, a natural response may be increased public concern about terrorism. But when a self-described Muslim perpetrates a terrorist attack, do negative attitudes toward Muslims also increase? If so, is this effect conditional on the nature of people’s past personal experiences with Muslims? We present natural experiment data based on a 2015 web-based survey of 2105 non-Muslims in the US, a survey that happened to span the…
Assessing the Relationship between Economic News Coverage and Mass Economic Attitudes
Do economic performance and economic news coverage influence public perceptions of the economy? Efforts to assess the effects are hampered by the interrelationships among the variables. In this paper, we bring to bear a more careful accounting of available economic variables than previous studies have used. We find that both media tone and economic attitudes are strongly related to actual economic performance. Moreover, after taking into account …
A Negativity Bias in Reframing Shapes Political Preferences Even in Partisan Contexts
Humans evolved to attend to valence and group membership when learning about their environment. The political domain offers a unique opportunity to study the simultaneous influence of these two broad, domain-general features of human experience. We examined whether the pervasive tendency for negatively valenced frames to “stick” in the mind applies to both intergroup and intragroup political contexts. In a preregistered experiment, we tested the …
Framing, identity, and responsibility: Do episodic vs. thematic framing effects vary by target population
Extensive political communication research shows that people respond differently to the same policy problem depending on how it is portrayed, or “framed.” Specifically, Iyengar [1991]. Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press] finds that when news coverage about a policy issue is framed episodically, citizens tend to attribute responsibility to the individual, whereas when news is framed…
When Celebrity and Political Journalism Collide: Reporting Standards, Entertainment, and the Conundrum of Covering Donald Trump’s 2016 Campaign
While the rise of celebrities-turned-politicians has been well documented and theorized, how their bids for office are treated by the establishment press has been less closely examined. Research on celebrity politics on the one hand, and on journalism standards on the other, have rarely been brought into conversation with one another. Here, we draw from both literatures to explore how the press covered Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. P…
Etch-a-Sketching: Evaluating the Post-Primary Rhetorical Moderation Hypothesis
Candidates have incentives to present themselves as strong partisans in primary elections, and then move “toward the center” upon advancing to the general election. Yet, candidates also face incentives not to flip-flop on their policy positions. These competing incentives suggest that candidates might use rhetoric to seem more partisan in the primary and more moderate in the general, even if their policy positions remain fixed. We test this idea …
Self-coding: A method to assess semantic validity and bias when coding open-ended responses
Open-ended survey questions can provide researchers with nuanced and rich data, but content analysis is subject to misinterpretation and can introduce bias into subsequent analysis. We present a simple method to improve the semantic validity of a codebook and test for bias: a “self-coding” method where respondents first provide open-ended responses and then self-code those responses into categories. We demonstrated this method by comparing respon…
Automated Text Classification of News Articles: A Practical Guide
Automated text analysis methods have made possible the classification of large corpora of text by measures such as topic and tone. Here, we provide a guide to help researchers navigate the consequential decisions they need to make before any measure can be produced from the text. We consider, both theoretically and empirically, the effects of such choices using as a running example efforts to measure the tone ofNew York Timescoverage of the econo…
Political science (21 works) · Politics (17 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (13 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Social Media and Politics (12 works) · Economics (9 works)