A Data-Driven Approach to American Culture

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Methodology

Abstract

I will show how to produce an original, data-driven inquiry into American culture. In previous conferences and a recently published article (JBSS 2016), I did provide a review of the literature to support a claim that there are multiple political traditions in America, and these traditions are distinct from one another. Because the expressions of "power" within each element of the culture is dissimilar to the expressions of other elements; then, the elements of liberalism, republicanism, and authoritarianism may be demarcated as independent variables. Based on previous work, this paper reveals the core values that each element of the culture produces, provides the operationalization of a data-driven approach to America's multiple traditions, and demonstrates the results of this original research design for American politics in the sub-field of culture.

After gathering a random sample of data about the Patriot Act, I code the data according to the available political signals stemming from the political traditions of liberalism, authoritarianism, and republicanism. In my example for this paper, the operationalization of the elements and analysis of a random sample of news on the Patriot Act does result in a finding that only sentences coded as republicanism are highly correlated with opposition to the Patriot Act. This paper is the first known essay to operationalize three elements of the culture in order to complete a data-driven approach to uncovering the American culture.

Author

• John Girdwood, Wayne State university