A Better Wordscores: Scaling Text with the Class Affinity Model

• In Event: Text as Data

Brief Overview

We update the Wordscores method of Laver, Benoit and Garry (2003) with a probabilistic, likelihood-based approach that we call class affinity scaling, demonstrating that it is superior to Wordscores for all applications.

Authors

• Ken Benoit, London School of Economics and Political Science

• Patrick Perry, New York University