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Caltech

Ulric B. and Evelyn L. Bray Social Sciences Seminar

Tuesday, March 6, 2018
4:00pm to 5:00pm
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Baxter B125
Measuring Polarization in High-Dimensional Data: Method and Application to Congressional Speech
Jesse Shapiro, George S. and Nancy B. Parker Professor of Economics, Brown University,

Abstract: We study trends in the partisanship of congressional speech from 1873 to 2016. We define partisanship to be the ease with which an observer could infer a congressperson's party from a fixed amount of speech, and we estimate it using a structural choice model and methods from machine learning. Our method corrects a severe finite-sample bias that we show arises with standard estimators. The results reveal that partisanship is far greater in recent years than in the past, and that it increased sharply in the early 1990s after remaining low and relatively constant over the preceding century. Our method is applicable to the study of high-dimensional choices in many domains, and we illustrate its broader utility with an application to residential segregation.

For more information, please contact Letty Diaz by phone at 626-395-1255 or by email at [email protected] or visit the full paper "Measuring Polarization in High-Dimensional Data: Method and Application to Congressional Speech" here..