Jean-François Godbout

Bio: Jean-François Godbout is an academic researcher from Université de Montréal. The author has contributed to research in topics: Voting & Disapproval voting. The author has an hindex of 10, co-authored 29 publications receiving 436 citations. Previous affiliations of Jean-François Godbout include Simon Fraser University & Northwestern University.

Language and Ideology in Congress

Abstract: Legislative speech records from the 101st to 108th Congresses of the US Senate are analysed to study political ideologies. A widely-used text classification algorithm – Support Vector Machines (SVM) – allows the extraction of terms that are most indicative of conservative and liberal positions in legislative speeches and the prediction of senators’ ideological positions, with a 92 per cent level of accuracy. Feature analysis identifies the terms associated with conservative and liberal ideologies. The results demonstrate that cultural references appear more important than economic references in distinguishing conservative from liberal congressional speeches, calling into question the common economic interpretation of ideological differences in the US Congress.

Economic Voting and Political Sophistication in the United States A Reassessment

Abstract: The authors propose a reexamination of the conditioning effect of political sophistication on economic voting in U.S. presidential elections. Replicating Gomez and Wilson's (2001) analysis with survey data from the past five American presidential elections (1988—2004), they show that low sophisticates strictly rely on sociotropic economic judgments in their intention to support the incumbent party's candidate. For their part, high sophisticates appear to use both sociotropic and pocketbook evaluations in their voting intention, but only in elections where the sitting incumbent is running for reelection (1992, 1996, and 2004). Most of these findings do not hold, however, once the postelectoral reported vote is used as the dependent variable. Indeed, the authors find that pocketbook evaluations do not have a significant impact on high sophisticates' reported vote choice, and they also find important variance in economic voting effects among low sophisticates. The results indicate that high sophisticates con...

Legislative Voting in the Canadian Parliament

Abstract: We analyze legislative votes in the 35 th (1994-97) and 38 th (200405) Canadian Parliaments over a multidimensional policy space. The results demonstrate that policy debates are two-dimensional in Canada. The first dimension represents the division between governing and opposition parties that has been found in similar parliamentary systems. The second dimension captures the opposition between Quebec and western provinces. There is a clear regional division between the Reform Party (and later the Conservative Party) and the Bloc Quebecois in both Parliaments; whereas the Liberals and the NDP occupy the center on this legislative dimension. We also note that the newly formed Conservative Party has moved closer to the center in the 38 th Parliament.

Why Do Parties Merge? The Case of the Conservative Party of Canada

Abstract: This article presents a case study of the recent merger between the Progressive-Conservative Party and the Reform/Canadian Alliance parties. The selection of this case serves to illustrate the current limits of existing party organisational change and party coalition theories when it comes to explaining party mergers. We propose an alternative theoretical framework that introduces some minor adjustments to the existing literature in order to account for the party merger phenomenon. In this framework, three factors are shown to be most likely to have led to a party merger in the Canadian context: votes-seats disproportionality, access to new resources (electoral and financial) and rebranding. We conclude with a discussion regarding these factors’ potential for explaining other cases of party mergers.

Class, Party, and South/Non-South Differences: An Update

Abstract: This article examines the past 50 years to update an analysis of the relationship between income and partisanship. Earlier, Nadeau and Stanley noted that therewas a change in partisanship in the South from inverse class polarization, in which higher income individuals more often identified with the Democratic Party, to normal class polarization, but the permanence of the shiftwas open to question. Now, with a longer time perspective and even greater partisan change, it can be concluded that class-based partisanship is not only a reality in the South but that it is now considerably stronger than in the rest of the country. Moreover, the South has not simply surged past a stable non-Southern level; greater polarization in the South has occurred in the context of growing class polarization in the non-South.

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

Abstract: Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts

Abstract: Politics and political conflict often occur in the written and spoken word. Scholars have long recognized this, but the massive costs of analyzing even moderately sized collections of texts have hindered their use in political science research. Here lies the promise of automated text analysis: it substantially reduces the costs of analyzing large collections of text. We provide a guide to this exciting new area of research and show how, in many instances, the methods have already obtained part of their promise. But there are pitfalls to using automated methods—they are no substitute for careful thought and close reading and require extensive and problem-specific validation. We survey a wide range of new methods, provide guidance on how to validate the output of the models, and clarify misconceptions and errors in the literature. To conclude, we argue that for automated text methods to become a standard tool for political scientists, methodologists must contribute new methods and new methods of validation. Language is the medium for politics and political conflict. Candidates debate and state policy positions during a campaign. Once elected, representatives write and debate legislation. After laws are passed, bureaucrats solicit comments before they issue regulations. Nations regularly negotiate and then sign peace treaties, with language that signals the motivations and relative power of the countries involved. News reports document the day-to-day affairs of international relations that provide a detailed picture of conflict and cooperation. Individual candidates and political parties articulate their views through party platforms and manifestos. Terrorist groups even reveal their preferences and goals through recruiting materials, magazines, and public statements. These examples, and many others throughout political science, show that to understand what politics is about we need to know what political actors are saying and writing. Recognizing that language is central to the study of politics is not new. To the contrary, scholars of politics have long recognized that much of politics is expressed in words. But scholars have struggled when using texts to make inferences about politics. The primary problem is volume: there are simply too many political texts. Rarely are scholars able to manually read all the texts in even moderately sized corpora. And hiring coders to manually read all documents is still very expensive. The result is that

Fightin' Words: Lexical Feature Selection and Evaluation for Identifying the Content of Political Conflict

Abstract: Entries in the burgeoning “text-as-data” movement are often accompanied by lists or visualizations of how word (or other lexical feature) usage differs across some pair or set of documents. These are intended either to establish some target semantic concept (like the content of partisan frames) to estimate word-specific measures that feed forward into another analysis (like locating parties in ideological space) or both. We discuss a variety of techniques for selecting words that capture partisan, or other, differences in political speech and for evaluating the relative importance of those words. We introduce and emphasize several new approaches based on Bayesian shrinkage and regularization. We illustrate the relative utility of these approaches with analyses of partisan, gender, and distributive speech in the U.S. Senate.