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Introduction to the Special Issue: The Statistical Analysis of Political Text

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Burt L. Monroe  and
Philip A. Schrodt
Burt L. Monroe*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802
Philip A. Schrodt
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045
*
e-mail: [email protected] (corresponding author)
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Extract

Text is arguably the most pervasive—and certainly the most persistent—artifact of political behavior. Extensive collections of texts with clearly recognizable political—as distinct from religious—content go back as far as 2500 BCE in the case of Mesopotamia and 1300 BCE for China, and 2400-year-old political discussions dating back to the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides are common fare even in the introductory study of political thought. Political tracts were among the earliest productions following the introduction of low-cost printing in Europe—fueling more than a few revolutions and social upheavals—and continuous printed records of legislative debates, such as the British parliament's Hansard and precursors tracing to 1802, cover centuries of political discussion.

Type
Special Issue: The Statistical Analysis of Political Text
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 16 , Issue 4: Special Issue: The Statistical Analysis of Political Text , Autumn 2008 , pp. 351 - 355
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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