Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Representation Inside and Outside Congress
- 2 Representation and Evaluation on the Senator's Terms
- 3 Measuring Presentational Styles with Senate Press Releases
- 4 Measuring Presentational Styles in Thousands of Press Releases
- 5 The Types of Presentational Styles in the U.S. Senate
- 6 The Electoral Connection's Effect on Senators' Presentational Styles
- 7 The Correspondence between Senators' Work in Washington and Presentational Styles
- 8 Why Presentational Styles Matter for Dyadic Representation
- 9 Why Presentational Styles Matter for Collective Representation
- 10 Presentational Styles and Representation
- Methods Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Measuring Presentational Styles in Thousands of Press Releases
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2013
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Representation Inside and Outside Congress
- 2 Representation and Evaluation on the Senator's Terms
- 3 Measuring Presentational Styles with Senate Press Releases
- 4 Measuring Presentational Styles in Thousands of Press Releases
- 5 The Types of Presentational Styles in the U.S. Senate
- 6 The Electoral Connection's Effect on Senators' Presentational Styles
- 7 The Correspondence between Senators' Work in Washington and Presentational Styles
- 8 Why Presentational Styles Matter for Dyadic Representation
- 9 Why Presentational Styles Matter for Collective Representation
- 10 Presentational Styles and Representation
- Methods Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The preceding chapter showed that press releases are a useful source for measuring how senators present their work to constituents. But the large collection of texts introduces a new problem: analyzing what senators say in the thousands of press releases issued each year. Applying the standard content-analysis technique – hand coding – is foreboding. Indeed, this cost is substantial enough that it leads most previous studies of congressional communication to focus on a subset of legislators or a set of case-study policy debates. But limiting the data to make analysis tractable also limits the questions the study can address – an unattractive option.
Rather than use hand coding, in this chapter I introduce a statistical model to measure senators' expressed priorities. The statistical model that I introduce simultaneously estimates the topics that senators discuss and the attention allocated to those topics. Along the way, the model also classifies each press release into a topic and classifies senators' expressed priorities into a broader type of presentational style. Using an array of validations, I show that the model is able to provide comprehensive, systematic, and verifiable measures of how senators present their work to constituents.
A skeptical reader is likely to wonder how useful statistical models are for analyzing the content of texts. After all, language is complex, subtle, and often difficult for humans to decipher – let alone a machine. But a growing literature suggests that automated and statistical models for texts are extremely useful.
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- Information
- Representational Style in CongressWhat Legislators Say and Why It Matters, pp. 40 - 58Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013