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RELATIO: Text Semantics Capture Political and Economic Narratives

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  • Elliott Ash
  • Germain Gauthier
  • Philine Widmer

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.

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  • Elliott Ash & Germain Gauthier & Philine Widmer, 2021. "RELATIO: Text Semantics Capture Political and Economic Narratives," Papers 2108.01720, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2022.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2108.01720
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    Cited by:

    1. Łukasz Baszczak, 2023. "Ekonomia narracji – początki nowego nurtu," Gospodarka Narodowa. The Polish Journal of Economics, Warsaw School of Economics, issue 1, pages 66-81.

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