Democratic Erosion and Media
Our project aims to examine how coverage of democracy by the U.S. news media has changed over time. We suspect that democracy has been framed differently over time, with coverage becoming increasingly negative in recent decades. We hope to apply dictionary-based sentiment analysis to evaluate democracy coverage, utilizing a large-scale dataset of newspaper articles from major publications over the last 40 years.
Members: Elliot Lee, Cooper Ferguson, India Walsh
Health of Local News System
The news plays a critical watchdog role in covering pressing issues and holding public officials accountable. As local news outlets decline across the U.S., many communities are left with limited access to reliable community reporting. This project examines how the strength or weakness of local news ecosystems could be linked to democratic erosion. By analyzing local newspaper readership and reach data, geographic gaps in news coverage using GIS technology, and consequences of reduced local coverage, this research aims to better understand how the erosion of local journalism can impact democratic participation.
Members: Victoria Fekete, Mona Garimella
Legislation Scraper
The Legislative Database Scraping team combines data science and political science to discover state legislation that contributes to democratic erosion. We use the Open States GitHub repository to extract the raw data of state legislation and continue with heavy data cleaning to concisely store all legislation information in CSV files, such as bill text, bill writers, and bill status. Using algorithms such as the LSTM model, we classify each bill to help political scientists flag whether the legislation shows signs of democratic erosion.
Members: Marisa MacDonald, Shivi Royal, Carson Wright
Book Review
In recent decades, the United States has experienced a notable rise in economic inequality and a stagnation in upward economic mobility. Despite this trend, a majority of American adults are reluctant to support policies for economic redistribution, and hold beliefs of prevailing upward mobility in the US. Eunji Kim offers an explanation for this phenomena in The American Mirage: How Reality Television Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy. Building on her much-lauded 2023 article “Entertaining Beliefs in Economic Mobility” and her dissertation, Kim argues that rags-to-riches programs reinforce the myth of the American Dream and legitimize income inequality in the U.S. Forthcoming in Political Science Quarterly, Professor Jaime Settle and members of the SNaPP Lab will evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, and implications of Kim’s book.
Members: Nikita Chellani, Abigail Furcy, Wengfay Ho, Emilia Murphy, Sarah Schulte