Book Projects

Scaling the Meaning of Text with Word Embeddings (with Colin R. Case)
Under Contract with Cambridge University Press’s Elements in Quantitative and Computational Methods for the Social Sciences

This book provides an accessible guide to scaling text using a word embedding approach. We begin by describing a motivating problem within the field of political science. Specifically, we review the challenges associated with scaling text for politicians’ left-right positioning on policy (e.g., taking a pro-life versus pro-choice stance on abortion); this serves as our running example throughout the book. We go on to discuss best practices for selecting corpora, extracting text of interest from documents using machine learning classifiers, and estimating word embedding models. Next, we discuss the logic behind semantic projection and explore approaches for producing an axis of meaning. In doing so, we put forth a framework for scaling the meaning of text at the document or covariate level. Subsequent chapters explore some potential avenues for evaluating measurement robustness and validation. In particular, we explore the utility of open-source and proprietary LLMs as a validation method. We also benchmark the performance of semantic protection relative to bag-of-words approaches against gold-standard human evaluations. Finally, we discuss extensions and other applications for this text scaling approach.

The Amateur Advantage: Understanding the Rise of Inexperience in Congress & Elections (with Sarah A. Treul)

Candidates with prior elected experience have historically seen overwhelming success in congressional elections. From the early 1980s to mid-2010s, three-quarters of members newly elected to the U.S. House of Representatives had previously held public, elected office; conversely, just half of all freshmen members elected from 2016 to 2020 had previous office-holding experience. In THE AMATEUR ADVANTAGE, Rachel Porter and Sarah A. Treul draw on a wide array of data to explore the causes and consequences of amateur politicians’ rising success in congressional elections. The authors contend that several meaningful changes have made the environment of U.S. elections more favorable to amateur politicians. First, Porter and Treul demonstrate that the recent democratization of campaign resources has made it easier for candidates to fundraise without party or political connections. Second, the authors show that the rise of identity politics in U.S. elections has broadened the scope of valence characteristics that offer candidates electoral value to extend beyond past elective experience. Importantly, they demonstrate that these newly salient identities disproportionately belong to candidates without an elected background. Porter and Treul then look beyond campaigns to examine the representational and legislative consequences of electing more political neophytes to Congress. The authors find that the recent influx of amateur politicians into Congress has brought new voices into government, particularly from groups traditionally underrepresented in lawmaking. They show that these new voices help to increase representational diversity in a chamber that skews heavily towards white men and career politicians. However, Porter and Treul also demonstrate that, across multiple dimensions, political neophytes are less effective legislators. Their findings highlight critical representational trade-offs associated with electing more political neophytes.

Some Politics Are Still Local: Representation in the Era of Nationalized Politics

Over the past several decades, American congressional elections have transformed from campaigns centered around local issues into nationally oriented—”nationalized”—contests. Today, candidates are perceived to run on the same party-driven platforms, offering voters uniform choices across the country with little regard for local or state-level political dynamics. In her book, SOME POLITICS ARE STILL LOCAL, Rachel Porter argues that this understanding of modern campaigns for Congress misses the mark. Porter shows that not all congressional elections today are nationalized, and some contests are still fought over local issues. To that end, she shows that theories of strategic candidate behavior must be updated to reflect better what locally-oriented campaigning looks like in today’s era of nationalized politics. Departing from existing work that considers campaigns as either national or local, Porter conceptualizes nationalized and locally oriented campaigns as opposite ends of a spectrum of choices. She argues that many candidates adopt national party positions while simultaneously highlighting local concerns. Empirical analyses and case studies demonstrate that this definition better captures what it means to “go local” in modern campaigns for Congress. Rachel Porter embarks on an ambitious data collection effort to measure the degree to which a candidate’s campaigns are locally oriented. She collects the policy platforms for all available, ballot-eligible primary election candidates for the House of Representatives who ran from 2018 to 2024. To assess the policy implications of a candidate’s campaign position-taking on their legislative activity, she pairs natural language processing tools with causal inference methods. SOME POLITICS ARE STILL LOCAL aims to refocus the discipline’s attention in an era of nationalized expectations back toward local considerations, reminding scholars of representation that local politics are still relevant in modern campaigns.
[Winner of the APSA’s 2023 E.E. Schattschneider Award]