Positioning under Alternative Electoral Systems: Evidence from Japanese Candidate Election Manifestos

Catalinac, Amy

doi:10.1017/s0003055417000399

Cited by 31 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…These models work without manual supervision because their algorithms automatically identify words that distinguish between documents based on their distribution; the models can scale or classify documents regardless of domain or language as far as they are correctly designed. For example, Catalinac (2018) analyzed Japanese election manifestos using a Wordfish, which was originally developed for German election manifestos (Slapin & Proksch, 2008). Other unsupervised machine learning models commonly used in political science are Correspondence Analysis (Greenacre, 1984), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Blei et al, 2003), and Structural Topic Model (Roberts et al, 2014).…”

Section: Unsupervised Machine Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Latent Semantic Scaling: A Semisupervised Text Analysis Technique for New Domains and Languages

Watanabe

2020

Communication Methods and Measures

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Many social scientists recognize that quantitative text analysis is a useful research methodology, but its application is still concentrated in documents written in European languages, especially English, and few sub-fields of political science, such as comparative politics and legislative studies. This seems to be due to the absence of flexible and cost-efficient methods that can be used to analyze documents in different domains and languages. Aiming to solve this problem, this paper proposes a semisupervised document scaling technique, called Latent Semantic Scaling (LSS), which can locate documents on various pre-defined dimensions. LSS achieves this by combining user-provided seed words and latent semantic analysis (word embedding). The article demonstrates its flexibility and efficiency in largescale sentiment analysis of New York Times articles on the economy and Asahi Shimbun articles on politics. These examples show that LSS can produce results comparable to that of the Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary (LSD) in both English and Japanese with only small sets of sentiment seed words. A new heuristic method that assists LSS users to choose a near-optimal number of singular values to obtain word vectors that best capture differences between documents on target dimensions is also presented. Many social scientists recognize that quantitative text analysis is a useful research methodology, but its application is still concentrated in documents written in European languages, especially English, and few sub-fields of political science, such as comparative politics and legislative studies. This is not because they are only interested in domestic politics in North America and Europe but because the existing quantitative text analysis toolkit is not suitable for analysis of documents in non-European languages or in other fields. The domination of European languages in quantitative text analysis is partially due to its history: many of the text analysis dictionaries, including the Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary (LSD) (Young & Soroka, 2012) and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), were created based on the General Inquirer dictionaries (Stone et al., 1966), which were developed to analyze English texts during the Cold War; statistical analysis of textual data was also introduced to political science for CONTACT Kohei Watanabe

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Section: Unsupervised Machine Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Latent Semantic Scaling: A Semisupervised Text Analysis Technique for New Domains and Languages

Watanabe

2020

Communication Methods and Measures

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“…Existing work elaborates repertoires of personal representation (Colomer 2011) by which representatives cultivate a direct relationship with voters, and try to distinguish themselves from their party. These include constituency service (Cain, Ferejohn, and Morris 1997; Karlsson 2018), pork barrel projects (Golden and Picci 2008; Samuels 1999), ideological position‐taking (Catalinac 2018), protection of public sector jobs (Alemán et al. 2020), and bill initiation (Däubler, Bräuninger, and Brunner 2016).…”

Section: Our Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Competing Principals? Legislative Representation in List Proportional Representation Systems

Buisseret

Prato

2020

American J Political Sci

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We develop a new framework to study legislative representation in list proportional representation (PR) systems. Our model studies a legislator's incentives to balance the competing interests of party leaders and local voters under a variety of list PR systems. We consider open and closed lists, as well as flexible lists—in which both rank assignments and preference votes determine the order in which seats are filled. We find that more flexibility can worsen local representation. List flexibility also acts as a key mediator of the effect of voter partisanship on party cohesion. And, our analysis reveals that higher district magnitude encourages representatives to toe the party line under all ballot systems.

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“…In the former system, voters can choose their most preferred candidates, while in the latter, voters are only provided a meaningful choice between parties. In candidate‐centered systems, legislators vote less in line with the party (Carey ; Cox, Fiva, and Smith ; Depauw and Martin ), focus more on their constituencies (Høyland, Hobolt, and Hix ; McLay and Vowles ), and run more personal campaigns (Catalinac ). Such behavior is mainly attributed to individual candidates’ incentive to influence their electoral prospects independently of the party leadership.…”

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confidence: 99%

Electoral Reform and Parliamentary Debates

Høyland

Søyland

2019

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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The early twentieth century saw many democracies adopt proportional representative systems. The textbook explanation, pioneered by Rokkan, emphasize between‐party electoral competition; the rise of the Socialist vote share made Bourgeois parties prefer PR systems to maximize their seat share. While appealing, this account is not entirely compelling. Consequently, scholars are investigating within‐party explanations of support for such reforms. Particularly, Cox, Fiva, and Smith show how list PR enable party leaders to discipline members and build cohesive parties. Relying on roll‐call votes across the Norwegian 1919 electoral reform from two‐round single‐member plurality to closed‐list PR, they show that the internal party cohesion increased following the reform. We investigate how the Norwegian electoral reform changed the content of parliamentary speeches. Comparing speeches from MPs present both before and after the reform, we show how parties become more cohesive in parliamentary debates under list PR than they were under the single‐member‐district system.

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Positioning under Alternative Electoral Systems: Evidence from Japanese Candidate Election Manifestos

Cited by 31 publications

References 79 publications

Latent Semantic Scaling: A Semisupervised Text Analysis Technique for New Domains and Languages

Latent Semantic Scaling: A Semisupervised Text Analysis Technique for New Domains and Languages

Competing Principals? Legislative Representation in List Proportional Representation Systems

Electoral Reform and Parliamentary Debates

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