21st Century Democracy

In politics, it’s become conventional wisdom that talking seriously to regular Americans doesn’t really pay off. Numerous studies have found that citizens appear to dig in their heels, resisting information that contradicts their beliefs - if they’re informed enough to have meaningful beliefs in the first place. When politicians talk to voters, the goal is usually to rev up their base, or shift a tiny wedge of the "undecided," rather to genuinely persuade a broad swath of the public. This might be a discouraging view of how politics works, but it’s also seen as realistic. If Americans aren’t persuadable, there’s little sense in members of Congress wasting their time trying to have meaningful conversations about the future of the country. This view is also mostly wrong.

We examine the social antecedents of contributing to campaigns, with a particular focus on the role of population density and social networking opportunities. Using 10 years of US campaign contribution data from the Federal Election Commission and a national survey of party leaders, we find that recruiting contributors is easier in a densely populated region, where the daily opportunity of individuals being exposed to the same information via their social networks is high. Furthermore, the effect of population density is heterogeneous with respect to mobility: if a region has substantial commuting outflow, the chance of being mobilized from the place of residence decreases, but the chance of mobilization in their place of work increases. This analysis also reveals differences between political parties. Democrats are more dependent on social netowrking in population dense areas. This difference in the importance of social networking opportunities present in geographical space helps explain macro-level patterns in party fundraising.

Barack Obama can spin a good phrase, and while his political opponents like to say his actions don’t always match his soaring rhetoric, there’s no denying the man has said a lot: So far in his presidency, he’s given more than 2,000 official speeches, uttering about 3.5 million different words. So what has he actually been telling us? To answer this question in a whole new way, we analysed all of Obama’s speeches through the end of September and looked at how frequently different terms came up. Surprises abound: Afghanistan was the most-mentioned country after the United States. He talks football more than basketball, Pelosi more than Reid and "change" more than "hope" - except in 2012. Here’s a unique look at what’s really on Obama’s mind.

"Man is by nature a political animal," as asserted by Aristotle. This political nature manifests itself in the data we produce and the traces we leave online. In this tutorial, we address a number of fundamental issues regarding mining of political data: What types of data would be considered political? What can we learn from such data? Can we use the data for prediction of political changes, etc? How can these prediction tasks be done efficiently? Can we use online socio-political data in order to get a better understanding of our political systems and of recent political changes? What are the pitfalls and inherent shortcomings of using online data for political analysis? In recent years, with the abundance of data, these questions, among others, have gained importance, especially in light of the global political turmoil and the upcoming 2016 US presidential election. We introduce relevant political science theory, describe the challenges within the framework of computational social science and present state of the art approaches bridging social network analysis, graph mining, and natural language processing.

While numerous political commentators have offered up their opinion about who won or lost last week’s GOP debate, we here at the Lazer Lab at Northeastern University spent the last week looking at the numbers. Actually, we looked at the words: What did candidates actually talk about? How much did they talk, and for how long? The answers gave us three new ways to think about what mattered in the debate, and who won.

Democrats talk about Iraq; Republicans talk about.........Panama? This week is a big one for America’s global relations. While Congress started hashing out whether to hand the president authority to finish the largest trade deal in history, Obama was wrapping up the G-7 economic summit in Germany. Beneath the talking points, what are America’s real priorities when it comes to the rest of the world? We decided to analyze what Congress actually talks about with it discusses foreign affairs - essentially, to draw a map of the world as seen from Capitol Hill. We took all the public statements of members of Congess from 2009 to 2014 (thanks go to VoteSmart for compiling them) and crunched them to see what countries Democrats and Republicans talk about, how their lists differ, and they view those countries as connected.