Enduring Cultural/Cognitive Structures: Political Logics as Cultural Memory

• In Event: 404 - Section on Social Psychology Paper Session. Computational Social Science and Studying Social Behavior

Abstract

Research has shown that, even controlling for different initial characteristics, cities and towns are put on different evolutionary paths by early events. These early events produce institutionalized knowledge and skills within communities that determine a general city “character” as well as later “civic capacity”. Supporting and expanding these regionally-based path-dependency theories, this article argues that, in addition to knowledge and capacity, regionally-based cultural and cognitive structures also persist over time in the form of institutional logics. Using a combination of computational text analysis, including topic modeling and other calculations, and qualitative in-depth readings of political literature, this article shows that the “political logics” that structured women's political organizations in Chicago and New York City were different from one another, and these city-distinct logics endured over a seventy year period. I argue these political logics constitute cognitive structures, which in turn constitute culture. This article highlights one use of computational text analysis: uncovering latent categories as they emerge inductively from data, effectively measuring the cognitive structures that structure language. When used on temporal data this method can measure how these structures change, or do not change, over time. These methods article can be used by other researchers to identify institutional logics, or cognitive structures, in other substantive areas.

Author

• Laura K. Nelson, University of California-Berkeley