Hi everyone,

This Friday, December 1 at noon Eastern time, the International Methods
Colloquium will host a presentation by Pamela Ban (Harvard University).
Pamela's presentation is entitled "How Newspapers Reveal Political Power:
The Decline of American Party Organizations."

The abstract for the presentation is as follows:

Political science is in large part the study of power, but power itself is
difficult to measure. We argue that we can use newspaper coverage -- in
particular, the relative amount of space devoted to particular subjects in
newspapers -- to measure the relative power of an important set of
political actors and offices.  We use a new dataset containing nearly 70
million historical newspaper pages from 2,700 local U.S. newspapers over
the years 1877--1977.  We define and discuss a measure of power we develop
based on observed word frequencies, and we validate it through a series of
analyses.  Overall, we find that the relative coverage of political actors
and of political offices is a strong indicator of political power for the
cases we study.  To illustrate its usefulness, we then use the measure to
understand when (and where) state and local party committees lost their
power.  We show how progressive-era political reforms that empower
candidates can erode local political organizations.  Taken together, these
papers shed light on the nature of political news coverage and offer both a
new dataset and a new measure for studying political power in a wide set of
contexts.

Two papers associated with the presentation are available at these links:

"How Newspapers Reveal Political Power:"
https://www.dropbox.com/s/96l4dmgc1kzadb0/Ban_et_al_newspapers.pdf?dl=0

"The Decline of American Party Organizations:"
https://www.dropbox.com/s/x7jek5nge3339wq/Ban_et_al_partyorgs.pdf?dl=0

To tune in to the presentation and participate in the discussion after the
talk, visit http://www.methods-colloquium.com/ and click "Watch Now!" on
the day of the talk. To register for the talk in advance, click here:

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/04e1bad2c5b5a67cdc2040ba88984b7b

The IMC uses Zoom, which is free to use for listeners and works on PCs,
Macs, and iOS and Android tablets and phones. You can be a part of the talk
from anywhere around the world with access to the Internet. The
presentation and Q&A will last for a total of one hour.

I hope to see you there!

-JE

--

Dr. Justin Esarey
Associate Professor of Political Science
Rice University
Voice: (678) 383-9629
Fax: (713) 348-5273
E-mail:  <[log in to unmask]>[log in to unmask]
Web: www.justinesarey.com

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