Latent structureText Scaling
Wordscores
Wordscores is a text-based scaling method developed by Laver, Benoit, and Garry (2003) that estimates the policy positions of political actors based on word frequencies in their texts. By comparing word usage in reference texts of known positions with test texts, the method infers the latent political dimension of any document without requiring manual coding or training data.
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Sources
- Laver, M., Benoit, K., & Garry, J. (2003). Extracting policy positions from political texts using words as data. American Political Science Review, 97(2), 311-331. DOI: 10.1017/S0003055403000662 ↗
- Benoit, K., & Laver, M. (2012). The basic arithmetic of legislative decisions. Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, 1(1), 1-29. link ↗
- Klemmensen, R., Hobolt, S. B., & Hansen, M. E. (2007). Estimating policy positions using political texts: A scaling approach. Electoral Studies, 26(4), 746-755. DOI: 10.1016/j.electstud.2007.07.003 ↗