Kevin M. Munger

Measuring and Explaining Political Sophistication Through Textual Complexity

Political scientists lack domain-specific measures for the purpose of measuring the sophistication of political communication. We systematically review the shortcomings of existing approaches, before developing a new and better method along with software tools to apply it. We use crowdsourcing to perform thousands of pairwise comparisons of text snippets and incorporate these results into a statistical model of sophistication. This includes previously excluded features such as parts of speech, and a measure of word rarity derived from dynamic term frequencies in the Google books dataset. Our technique not only shows which features are appropriate to the political domain and how, but also provides a measure easily applied and re-scaled to political texts in a way that facilitates probabilistic comparisons. We reanalyze the State of the Union corpus to demonstrate how conclusions differ when using our improved approach, including the ability to compare complexity as a function of covariates.

Choosing in Groups: Voting as a Collective Action Problem

“I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.” — Neil Gaiman, Sandman #18: “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” What if they had an election and nobody came? In Newport, England, an election for Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) had a zero turnout in at least one polling station in Bettws. According to the BBC: Newport councillor Kevin Whitehead, Independent member for the city’s Bettws ward, said it was “staggering” that a polling station had failed to register a single vote. “ It’s just apathy. I think apathy rules when it comes to politics in general ,” he said. “ People are more concerned with the bigger picture like the recession .” Conservative councillor Matthew Evans, who is the leader of the opposition on Newport council, said the fact nobody had voted at a polling station “doesn’t show anybody in a particularly good light”. However, he said he was not surprised there was a low turnout generally in the elections. “Clearly, if you’ve got a polling station where nobody turns up , it’s extremely disappointing,” he said. “It’s quite frankly a daft time of the year to have an election – it’s cold and miserable .” “It wasn’t a topic that people felt passionately about.” Labour’s Newport West MP Paul Flynn, whose constituency includes Bettws, said he believed a lack of enthusiasm for the elections from the Conservative Party which introduced the policy had contributed to the low turnout. But he admitted another factor was the lack of trust in politics and lack of confidence in politicians generally . The total turnout for Wales was 14.9%. BBC News Website, November 16, 2012, “Zero turnout at Newport polling station in PCC election.” (Emphases added)