“…This study uses a big‐data approach, mainly by web scraping and conducting text analysis of online comments about China's latest anticorruption campaign. The big‐data approach dramatically increases the number and types of observations and variables available for analysis (Grimmer ; Monroe et al ; Titiunik ).…”
“…This study uses a big‐data approach, mainly by web scraping and conducting text analysis of online comments about China's latest anticorruption campaign. The big‐data approach dramatically increases the number and types of observations and variables available for analysis (Grimmer ; Monroe et al ; Titiunik ).…”
“…With the choice of a partial method such as descriptive inference, I do not intend to cover the complexity of the CPT but only to take a first step toward the phenomenon of limited performance by the CDS, considering it as a process in progress, and at a critical juncture such as the disintegration of its parent organization, the UNASUR (Mijares & Nolte, ). The application of descriptive inference creates the possibility for political scientists to ask causal questions and develop new hypotheses in recent or even ongoing processes (Grimmer, ; Monroe, Pan, Roberts, Sen, & Sinclair, ). The hypothesis being tested assumes thatH1: The search for national autonomy in the framework of the search for regional autonomy generated a dynamic of competition that resulted in the lack of operability of the CDS.H1a: There was reluctance to establish alliances or deep security and defense commitments.H1b: The prior reluctance brought limitations in the institutional design of the CDS.H1c: The limitation by design of the CDS created conditions for the bi‐lateralization and mini‐lateralization of South American security‐cooperation policy (if any), generating a dynamic of competition that resulted in the lack of operability of the CDS.…”
Section: The Cds Performance: a Descriptive Inferencementioning
This article evaluates the performance of the South American Defense Council, based on the rational institutional design and the concept of the operability of alliances. The trajectory of the Council between 2009 and 2018, is examined through a theoretical approximation inspired by neoclassical realism and by applying the descriptive inference method of process tracing. The results indicate that in almost a decade, the Defense Council of the Union of South American Nations did not achieve full operability according to its institutional design. The evidence suggests that aspirations of national autonomy undermined the regional security autonomy project. The article affirms that the presence of a South American security regionalism problem resulting from national and regional autonomy tensions generated a paradox of autonomy.
“…Instead of focusing on parameter estimation of models built from theory, machine learning models are typically evaluated on their ability to predict held-out samples of the data. Unlike the predictive use of machine learning common among computer scientists, social scientists start employing machine learning to measure latent characteristics in the social world and refine methods of causal inference from observational data [29][30][31][32].…”
Section: Computational Tools As the Econometrics Of Sociologymentioning
Analytical sociology focuses on social interactions among individuals and the hard-to-predict aggregate outcomes they bring about. It seeks to identify generalizable mechanisms giving rise to emergent properties of social systems which, in turn, feed back on individual decision-making. This research program benefits from computational tools such as agent-based simulations, machine learning, and large-scale web experiments, and has considerable overlap with the nascent field of computational social science. By providing relevant analytical tools to rigorously address sociology's core questions, computational social science has the potential to advance sociology in a similar way that the introduction of econometrics advanced economics during the last half century. Computational social scientists from computer science and physics often see as their main task to establish empirical regularities which they view as ''social laws.'' From the perspective of the social sciences, references to social laws appear unfounded and misplaced, however, and in this article we outline how analytical sociology, with its theory-grounded approach to computational social science, can help to move the field forward from mere descriptions and predictions to the explanation of social phenomena.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
