Week 7

MACS 30405: Exploring Cultural Space
University of Chicago

Annoucement

  • The word-embedding notebook and exercise is released today.
    • If you need extra time to work on exercise 4, please let me know.
  • Office hours:
    • for Python troubleshooting/debugging: Mon, May 6, 3 - 5 pm
    • for final project: by appointment
  • I haven’t read your exercise 1 & 2 yet. I’ll try to provide some feedback over this weekend.
  • Readings for week 8 will be released today.
  • You are expected to make an oral presentation of your final project at the last meeting of our class. The presentation should be about 10-15 mins long.

Garg et al. (2018)

  • Using word-embedding models, the authors produce various time-series measures of gender/racial stereotypes in American English.
    • Do you find their results reliable?
    • Do you agree with their interpretations？What do the results say?
    • What are potential problems of their measures?

Codes

Break

Jost et al. (2009)

  • Ideology as coherent ideas in people’s heads
    • To what extent is ideology social?
  • What constitute the core ideas of an ideology? What are accidental?
  • Do ideological dimensions correspond to psychological dimensions?
    • What are the top-down and bottom-up approaches?
    • What are ideological dimensions? Why do we have non-orthogonal dimensions (economic vs. social-cultural)?

DW-Nominate in a nutshell

  • was invented by Poole and Rosenthal
  • is essentially very similar to PCA/CA but uses a loglinear estimation
  • data: Congress roll calls
  • goal: find out 1d or 2d ideal points that can best explain the votes
  • Scholars usually find that a single dimension would suffice in distinguishing the voting outcomes

Question: Does the method really capture ideology?