"Freewheeling Generals" and Inter-Elites Consensus in the U.S.: Evidence from Computer-Assisted Text Analysis

• In Event: 3554 - States and Political Power

Abstract

Is the military elite merely a servant to the U.S. capitalist class and its global empire, as the study of power elites since William Domhoff usually assumes? Or does the military elite have its own agenda independent of the political and the economic elites? To shed light on these questions, I compare the military elite’s ideas to that of the political elite’s and the economic one’s, regarding a crucial topic in U.S. post-Cold War foreign policy: China. To make this comparison, I incorporate multiple techniques of computer-assisted text analysis and design a three-step strategy. First, I use structural topic models to identify major topics in each elite’s discussion of China and to see, if any, what shared topics of interest are. I verify results from the first step with a word-embedding analysis in the second step. The last step aims to find out who influenced who regarding key topics dominating today’s discussion of China in the U.S. I conduct a word-frequency test, using keywords of each share topics specified in the first two steps and tracing their frequency-trend over the period under study. Text data for this analysis are collected from various kinds of publications, including newspapers, magazines/journals, congressional records, and government reports. In conclusion, I have identified four topics regarding China, as shared by the economic elite and the military elite: China’s maritime territorial dispute with neighboring countries, forced technology transfer to China, China’s land territorial unity/separation, and China’s energy supplies. Among these topics, the significance of the first two increased over time. The word-frequency test has confirmed that the military elite paid attention to both topics before the economic elite, indicating the former had an influence over the public discussion of China. Topics identified with the political elite do not overlap with that of the other two.

Author

• Zhifan Luo, State University of New York--University at Albany