Quantitative Content Analysis in Political Analysis

• In Event: Poster Session: Experimental Research & Qualitative and Multi-Method Research
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Qualitative and Multi-Method Research

Abstract

This iPoster explores potential applications of quantitative content analysis in political analysis. First, I discuss non-traditional sources of political texts, such as the Internet Archive or "Wayback Machine," that can be used to trend political beliefs over time and across regions. Second, I compare the differing but surprisingly compatible fields of discourse and content analysis, arguing that both can be used to reconstruct political beliefs and arguments from unstructured texts. Finally, I give examples from my own research into China's monetary policy. China analysts are afforded relatively fewer sources of insight into the opaque Chinese political process. In the face of such a dearth of authoritative sources, my research adopted a mixed-methods analytical approach focused on official and public discourse relevant to the internationalization debate. I leveraged both qualitative methods as well as quantitative content analysis of an author-collected corpus of over 100,000 texts culled from official and popular media, government policy documents, and historical website data going back nearly 15 years. This dataset incorporated texts representative of the bureaucratic institutions with a voice in China’s monetary policymaking as well as popular treatments of the issue. I argue that this approach enabled granular understanding of who argued for and against renminbi internationalization, when they did so, the nature of their argument, and how these positions changed over time. I conclude with suggestions for applying these techniques to other research projects.

Author

• Michael Bartee, National Defense University