Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T07:22:33.907Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Archived Attributes: An Internet-Text Approach to Measuring Legislator Attitudes and Behavior

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2020

Emily Kalah Gade Open the ORCID record for Emily Kalah Gade [Opens in a new window] ,
Sarah Dreier ,
John Wilkerson  and
Anne Washington Open the ORCID record for Anne Washington [Opens in a new window]
Emily Kalah Gade*
Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Sarah Dreier
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
John Wilkerson
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
Anne Washington
Affiliation:
NYU Steinhardt, New York, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Internet Archive curated a 90-terabyte sub-collection of captures from the US government's public website domain (‘.gov’). Such archives provide largely untapped resources for measuring attributes, behaviors and outcomes relevant to political science research. This study leverages this archive to measure a novel dimension of federal legislators' religiosity: their proportional use of religious rhetoric on official congressional websites (2006–2012). This scalable, time-variant measure improves upon more costly, time-invariant conventional approaches to measuring legislator attributes. The authors demonstrate the validity of this method for measuring legislators' public-facing religiosity and discuss the contributions and limitations of using archived Internet data for scientific analysis. This research makes three applied methodological contributions: (1) it develops a new measure for legislator religiosity, (2) it models an improved, more comprehensive approach to analyzing congressional communications and (3) it demonstrates the unprecedented potential that archived Internet data offer to researchers seeking to develop meaningful, cost-effective approaches to analyzing political phenomena.

Keywords

religiosityUS Congressweb archivesmethodology‘big data’text-as-data
Type
Letter
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 1734 - 1741
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alpert, J and Hajaj, N (2008) We knew the web was big… Official Google Blog, 25 July. Available from https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html.Google Scholar
ANES (2016) American National Election Studies. Available from http://electionstudies.org/.Google Scholar
Bicquelet, A, Weale, A and Bara, J (2012) In a different parliamentary voice? Politics & Gender 8(1), 83–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Braman, E and Sinno, AH (2009) An experimental investigation of causal attributions for the political behavior of Muslim candidates: can a Muslim represent you? Politics and Religion 2(2), 247–276.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burden, BC (2007) Personal Roots of Representation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calfano, BR and Djupe, PA (2009) God talk: religious cues and electoral support. Political Research Quarterly 62(2), 329–339.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calfano, BR and Djupe, PA (2011) Not in his image: the moderating effect of gender on religious appeals. Politics and Religion 4, 338–354.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, DE, Green, JC and Layman, GC (2010) The party faithful: partisan images, candidate religion, and the electoral impact of party identification. American Journal of Political Science 55(1), 42–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, DE et al. (2018) Putting politics first: the impact of politics on American religious and secular orientations. American Journal of Political Science 62(3), 551–565.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chapp, CB (2012) Religious Rhetoric and American Politics: The Endurance of Civil Religion in Electoral Campaigns. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Clifford, S and Gaskins, B (2016) ’Trust me, I believe in god’: candidate religiousness as a signal of trustworthiness. American Politics Research 44(6), 1066–1097.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coe, K and Chapp, CB (2017) Religious rhetoric meets the target audience: narrowcasting faith in presidential elections. Communication Monographs 84(1), 110–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collingwood, L (2019) Campaigning in A Racially Diversifying America: When and How Cross-Racial Electoral Mobilization Works. New York: Oxford University Press, (forthcoming).Google Scholar
Diermeier, D et al. (2012) Language and ideology in Congress. British Journal of Political Science 42(1), 31–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Djupe, PA, Neiheisel, JR and Sokhey, AE (2018) Reconsidering the role of politics in leaving religion: the importance of affiliation. American Journal of Political Science 62(1), 161–175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Djupe, PA, Olson, LR and Gilbert, CP (2005) Sources of clergy support for denominational lobbying in Washington. Review of Religious Research 47, 86–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Domke, D and Coe, K (2008) The God Strategy: How Religion became a Political Weapon in America. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dowland, S (2015) Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Esterling, KM, Lazer, DMJ and Neblo, MA (2010) Improving Congressional Websites. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.Google Scholar
Fastnow, C, Grant, JT and Rudolph, TJ (1999) Holy roll calls: religious tradition and voting behavior in the US house. Social Science Quarterly, 687–701.Google Scholar
Gade, EK, Wilkerson, J and Washington, A (2017) The .GOV internet archive: a big data resource for political science. The Political Methodologist, 16 March.Google Scholar
Gade, EK, Dreier, S, Wilkerson, J, Washington, A (2020), Replication data for: Archived attributes: an internet-text approach to measuring legislator attitudes and behavior, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GNL6XG, Harvard Dataverse, V1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guth, JL (2014) Religion in the American Congress: the case of the US House of Representatives, 1953–2003. Religion, State & Society 42(2–3), 299–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guth, JL and Kellstedt, LA (2005) The Confessional Congress: Religion and Legislative Behavior. Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL.Google Scholar
Guth, JL et al. (2006) Religious influences in the 2004 presidential election. Presidential Studies Quarterly 36(2), 223–242.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hadaway, CK and Marler, PL (2005) How many Americans attend worship each week? An alternative approach to measurement. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44(3), 307–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones-Correa, MA and Leal, DL (2001) Political participation: does religion matter? Political Research Quarterly 54(4), 751–770.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Layman, G (1999) ’Culture wars’ in the American party system: religious and cultural change among partisan activists since 1972. American Politics Quarterly 27(1), 89–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, JB et al. (2018) Voteview: Congressional Roll-Call Votes Database. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Department of Political Science. Available from https://voteview.com/data.Google Scholar
Maltzman, F and Sigelman, L (1996) The politics of talk: unconstrained floor time in the US House of Representatives. The Journal of Politics 58(3), 819–830.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marchetti, K and O'Connell, D (2017) Catholic politicians and the politics of abortion position taking. Politics and Religion 11(2), 281–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Margolis, MF (2018) From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marietta, M (2009) The absolutist advantage: sacred rhetoric in contemporary presidential debate. Political Communication 26(4), 388–411.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mihut, L (2011) Lobbying–a political communication tool for churches and religious organizations. Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies (29), 64–86.Google Scholar
Newman, B et al. (2016) Religion and environmental politics in the US House of Representatives. Environmental Politics 25(2), 289–314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norris, P and Inglehart, R (2011) Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oldmixon, EA (2005) Uncompromising Positions: God, Sex, and the US House of Representatives. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Oldmixon, EA and Hudson, W (2008) When church teachings and policy commitments collide: perspectives on Catholics in the US House of Representatives. Politics and Religion 1(1), 113–136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osborn, T and Mendez, JM (2010) Speaking as women: women and floor speeches in the Senate. Journal of Women, Politics & Policy 31(1), 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schonhardt-Bailey, C (2008) The congressional debate on partial-birth abortion: constitutional gravitas and moral passion. British Journal of Political Science 38(3), 383–410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shalizi, C (2013) Advanced data analysis from an elementary point of view. Available from https://pdf4pro.com/view/advanced-data-analysis-from-an-elementary-point-of-view-4718fc.html.Google Scholar
Tesler, M (2015) Priming predispositions and changing policy positions: an account of when mass opinion is primed or changed. American Journal of Political Science 59(4), 806–824.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yamane, D and Oldmixon, EA (2006) Religion in the legislative arena: affiliation, salience, advocacy, and public policymaking. Legislative Studies Quarterly 31(3), 433–460.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Gade et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GNL6XG
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Gade et al. supplementary material

Gade et al. supplementary material

Download Gade et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 609.1 KB