Quantifying economic policy
Unsupervised learning on archival evidence from the United Kingdom, 1983–2021
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6259598 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Mircea Popa (0000-0003-2961-7250, School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies University of Bristol UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 63 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 750-773 |
| Publication date | 2024-05-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Journal of Political Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0304-4130 • E-ISSN: 1475-6765 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1475-6765.12619 |
| OpenAlex | W4386051496 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 30 |
The evolution of economic policy in Western countries in the post‐1980 era is subject to extensive academic debate, but statistical modelling of its many qualitative aspects can be challenging. I use two sources of textual data from the United Kingdom – policy documents written by executive departments, as well as recently declassified cabinet minutes – together with unsupervised text‐as‐data methods to examine the evolution of economic policy discourse between 1983 and 2021. The findings challenge the hypothesis of an undifferentiated post‐1980 liberal era. Instead, several shifts away from the liberalizing priorities of the 1980s are identified. The first is an increased attention to the public services in the 1990s. The second is a rise of activist approaches focused on state‐supported innovation in the 2010s – a claim which has been widely articulated but has not been rigorously tested so far. These discourse‐based conclusions are validated through an econometric analysis of detailed spending data
Cabinet (room · Econometric analysis · Economics · Kingdom · Library science · Macroeconomics · Political science · Public policy · Sociology · State (computer science · Subject (documents · Computational and Text Analysis Methods · Computer Science · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Monetary Policy and Economic Impact · Public Administration
Macroeconomic Policies of Developed Democracies
The New Public Management in Action
Industrial Policy for the Twenty-First Century
Partisan politics
Quanteda
Hypothesis Testing with Efficient Method of Moments Estimation
Mission-oriented innovation policies
Text-mining the signals of climate change doubt
Policy punctuations in the UK
Domestic Budgets in a United Europe
Privatizing the Public Business Sector in the Eighties
Structural Topic Models for Open‐Ended Survey Responses
Equality, Employment, and Budgetary Restraint
The Agenda of British Government
Text Preprocessing For Unsupervised Learning
Text as Data
From There to Here
What Are Policy Punctuations? Large Changes in the Legislative Agenda of the UK Government, 1911–2008
Comparative studies of policy agendas
Political Parties and the Supply Side of the Economy
Punctuations and Turning Points in British Politics
New Public Management Is Dead--Long Live Digital-Era Governance
Industrial Policy in the 21st Century
Rethinking Comparative Political Economy
| Citations per year | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |