United States
Academic Research
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Journal Article
Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages
Sociological Methods & Research, 2025
How can one understand the spread of ideas across text data? This is a key measurement problem in sociological inquiry, from the study of how interest groups shape media discourse, to the spread of policy across institutions, to the diffusion of organizational structures and institution themselves. To study how ideas and narratives diffuse across text, we must first develop a method to identify whether texts share the same information and narratives, rather than the same broad themes or exact features. We propose a novel approach to measure this quantity of interest, which we call “narrative similarity,” by using large language models to distill texts to their core ideas and then compare the similarity of claims rather than of words, phrases, or sentences. The result is an estimand much closer to narrative similarity than what is possible with past relevant alternatives, including exact text reuse, which returns lexically similar documents; topic modeling, which returns topically similar documents; or an array of alternative approaches. We devise an approach to providing out-of-sample measures of performance (precision, recall, F1) and show that our approach outperforms relevant alternatives by a large margin. We apply our approach to an important case study: The spread of Russian claims about the development of a Ukrainian bioweapons program in U.S. mainstream and fringe news websites. While we focus on news in this application, our approach can be applied more broadly to the study of propaganda, misinformation, diffusion of policy and cultural objects, among other topics.
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Journal Article
Labeling Social Media Posts: Does Showing Coders Multimodal Content Produce Better Human Annotation, and a Better Machine Classifier?
Political Science Research and Methods, 2025
Reports & Analysis
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Analysis
Who Has a Policy that Would Benefit You? More Voters Say Trump.
National survey data from the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections shed light on how candidates' campaign strategies impact voter policy recall.
November 2, 2024
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Analysis
How Americans’ Confidence in Technology Firms has Dropped
Results from the American Institutional Confidence poll's second wave show that the public's confidence in technology, and tech companies, has markedly decreased over the past five years.
June 14, 2023
News & Commentary
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Policy
A Dangerous Plan to ‘Win’ the AI Race is Circulating
The artificial intelligence (AI) regulation moratorium introduced in the House budget reconciliation plan poses consequences to American citizens' safety. While state AI regulation may not be perfect, they have played a key role in protecting consumers, as the federal government has failed to act in this regulatory arena.
May 14, 2025
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News
How Do State Lawmakers Decide What to Prioritize?
New research reveals state legislators respond to both local constituents and national politicians when setting their policy agendas, with stronger influence from politically engaged partisans within their states.
April 21, 2025