English

RELATIO: Text Semantics Capture Political and Economic Narratives

General Economics 2022-05-02 v3 Economics

Abstract

Social scientists have become increasingly interested in how narratives -- the stories in fiction, politics, and life -- shape beliefs, behavior, and government policies. This paper provides an unsupervised method to quantify latent narrative structures in text documents. Our new software package RELATIO identifies coherent entity groups and maps explicit relations between them in the text. We provide an application to the United States Congressional Record to analyze political and economic narratives in recent decades. Our analysis highlights the dynamics, sentiment, polarization, and interconnectedness of narratives in political discourse.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2108.01720,
  title  = {RELATIO: Text Semantics Capture Political and Economic Narratives},
  author = {Elliott Ash and Germain Gauthier and Philine Widmer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.01720},
  year   = {2022}
}