Structural Topic Model
The Structural Topic Model (STM) is a text-as-data method that discovers latent themes in a corpus while letting document metadata — party, time, gender, treatment condition — shape those themes. Introduced by Roberts, Stewart, Tingley and colleagues in 2014, it generalizes correlated topic modeling so that topic prevalence (how much a document is about a topic) and topic content (the words used to express a topic) can both depend on covariates. The result is a single model that simultaneously estimates topics and how their use varies across known groups, with uncertainty.
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Sources
- Roberts, M. E., Stewart, B. M., Tingley, D., Lucas, C., Leder-Luis, J., Gadarian, S. K., Albertson, B., & Rand, D. G. (2014). Structural Topic Models for Open-Ended Survey Responses. American Journal of Political Science, 58(4), 1064–1082. DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12103 ↗
- Roberts, M. E., Stewart, B. M., & Tingley, D. (2019). stm: An R Package for Structural Topic Models. Journal of Statistical Software, 91(2), 1–40. DOI: 10.18637/jss.v091.i02 ↗
- Grimmer, J., & Stewart, B. M. (2013). Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts. Political Analysis, 21(3), 267–297. DOI: 10.1093/pan/mps028 ↗
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Structural Topic Model (Topic Modeling with Document-Level Covariates). ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/political-science/structural-topic-model
Which method?
Set this method beside its closest kin and read them side by side — the library lays the books on the table; the choice is yours.
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