Year: 2021
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Who influences a politician’s public statements? In this paper, we explore one plausible explanation: that financial incentives from campaign contributors affect what politicians say. Based on this idea, we design text-driven models for campaign contribution profile prediction. Using a large corpus of public microblog messages by members of the U.S. Congress, we find evidence for such an association, at the level of contributing industries. We find complementary strengths in a simple model (which has better predictive accuracy) and a more complex model (which gives a more intuitive, human-interpretable explanation).
Authors: Tae Yano, Dani Yogatama, Noah Smith
Institution: Carnegie Mellon University
Language: English
Subfield: General Social Sciences
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2192712876