Salomon Orellana

This study explores how natural language processing (NLP) can supplement content analyses of political documents, particularly the manifestos of political parties. NLP is particularly useful for tasks such as: estimating the similarity between documents, identifying the topics discussed in documents (topic modeling), and sentiment analysis. This study applies each of these techniques to the study of political party manifestos. Document similarity may be used to gain some insight into the way parties change over time and which political parties are successful at bringing attention to their policy agenda. Categorizing text into topics may help objectively categorize and visualize the ideas political parties are discussing. Finally, sentiment analysis has the potential to show each political party’s attitude towards a policy area/topic. This study specifically applies these techniques to the manifestos produced by the political parties of New Zealand, from 1987 to 2017 (a period of significant party system change in New Zealand). It finds that NLP techniques provide valuable insights, although there is a need for significant fine-tuning.

I argue in this chapter that because less-proportional/fewer-party systems tend to limit dissent, they are more susceptible to pandering, defined in this book as the pursuit of votes (by parties/politicians) by expressing positions and adopting policies that appeal to voters’ default preference for quick-fix policies, generally at the expense of the society’s longer-term interests. I look for evidence of these dynamics especially in policy areas related to personal security (where fear is more readily mobilized), but also in environmental protection, and fiscal management.

Have you ever noticed that children are funny? Or have you at least noticed how often adults talk about the funny things children do? In this book I make the case that children are indeed naturally funny and that by studying their humorousness we can actually gain a much greater understanding of humor. In fact, I go so far as to claim that children are central to humor: that the evolution of humor behaviors has much to do with children and consequently much of (and perhaps all) the humor we observe in our daily lives is based on childishness – including the comedy produced by professional funny people and even the humor produced by our pets. These ideas should be interesting on their own, but what if I told you that they can also help you become funnier? In fact, much of this book is dedicated to showing you how childishness can help us all become significantly funnier. I’ll make the case that childishness can be thought of as an organizing principle that helps us efficiently organize the wide varieties of humor that exist. This organization, in turn, can help us think more efficiently about humor and thus help us think more quickly on our feet, when a situation calls for some humor. Consequently, this organizing principle can help us become naturally funnier, perhaps more effectively than any other approach currently in existence.

In Chapter 2 I discussed Acemoglu and Robinson’s (2012) argument that economic development is hindered by political and economic institutions that are structured so that the few can enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of society. In their book, Acemoglu and Robinson focus exclusively on how elite extraction keeps countries underdeveloped, but in this chapter I argue that extraction is also present in more limited (but still damaging) forms across more developed societies, and that electoral institutions influence the degree to which this elite extraction can be contained. The electoral institutions focused on in this book should affect extraction primarily by affecting the responsiveness of the political system. We will see that countries with proportional/multiparty systems tend to have significantly lower levels of inequality, lower rates of obesity, and higher levels alternative energy usage than countries with less-proportional/fewer-party systems. I argue that these results are in part driven by the greater ability of proportional/multiparty countries to adopt policies opposed by powerful economic interests. In this chapter I also briefly discuss several other policy areas where the “extractive dynamics” are likely at work, but that are more difficult to explore statistically (e.g., internet quality, public transportation, and health care) – mainly because of deficiencies in cross-national data for these indicators.