Text as Data

Intertemporal evidence on the strategy of populism in the United States

Do candidates use populism to maximize the impact of political campaigns? We show that candidates strategically adapt when campaigning in stiffly competitive districts with high levels of economic insecurity.

Emotion and reason in political language

This paper studies the use of emotion and reason in political discourse. Adopting computational-linguistics techniques to construct a validated text-based scale, we measure emotionality in 6 million speeches given in U.S. Congress over the years …

Empathy-based counterspeech can reduce racist hate speech in a social media field experiment

Despite heightened awareness of the detrimental impact of hate speech on social media platforms on affected communities and public discourse, there is little consensus on approaches to mitigate it. While content moderation—either by governments or …