Abstract
For the first time in the literature, we develop a quantitative
indicator of the Chinese government’s policy priorities over a long
period of time, which we call the Policy Change Index (PCI) of China.
The PCI is a leading indicator of policy changes that runs from 1951 to
the third quarter of 2018, and it can be updated in the future. It is
designed with two building blocks: the full text of the People’s Daily —
the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China — as input data
and a set of machine learning techniques to detect changes in how this
newspaper prioritizes policy issues. Due to the unique role of the
People’s Daily in China’s propaganda system, detecting changes in this
newspaper allows us to predict changes in China’s policies. The
construction of the PCI does not require the researcher’s understanding
of the Chinese context, which suggests a wide range of applications in
other settings, such as predicting changes in other (ex-)Communist
regimes’ policies, measuring decentralization in central-local
government relations, quantifying media bias in democratic countries,
and predicting changes in lawmaker’s voting behavior and in judges’
ideological leaning.
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