Paper Presentation @ Dublin COMPTEXT 2022
Factionalism and the Red Guards under Mao’s China: Ideal Point Estimation Using Text Data
In this paper, we design a new strain of text scaling method, Swordfish (Slogan-featured Wordfish), that takes advantage of the TextRank algorithm to extract the most representative political slogans in a given context and estimates Wordfish with those extracted text variables. We test this method using the case of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China and the historical archive of handwritten big-character posters and self-printed tabloids from 1966. We estimate student protests’ ideal points by analyzing expressed political views in propaganda publications. Our findings point to evidence of factional re(de)alignments within the movement and demonstrate how the students from different educational backgrounds followed Mao Zedong and Xiaohongshu 小紅書 (Little Red Book) and then fell into armed conflicts that divided families, the classes and the society. The results estimated by our approach are shown to be consistent with the representative qualitative literature of factionalism regarding the Cultural Revolution.
Session: Panel 5C Political Speech Around The World
Time: 11:30–13:00 Saturday, 7th May
Electoral Reform and Pork Barrel in Parliamentary Questions
Measuring legislator behaviours and tendencies towards constituencies under different electoral systems is important. This paper quantitatively investigates this topic using the case of Taiwan Legislative Yuan and data on written parliamentary questions through an electoral reform from multi-member districts (MMD) to single-member districts (SMD). With existing labelled pork legislation, I train deep learning models using convolutional neural networks with an embedding layer extracted from Transformer BERT to detect pork-barrel features in parliamentary questions over time. Evidence exists to show that legislators under MMD are more likely to express political intention about pork-barrel projects in written parliamentary questions. The reform subsequently demonstrates heterogeneous effects on major parties vis-à-vis minority parties, respectively.
Keywords：electoral reform, single-member districts (SMDs), distributive politics, deep learning, Transformers, BERT
Session: Panel 3D - Targeted Rhetoric in Parliamentary Debates
Time: 14:00–15:30 Saturday, 6th May