Computer‐Assisted Keyword and Document Set Discovery from Unstructured Text

The (unheralded) first step in many applications of automated text analysis involves selecting keywords to choose documents from a large text corpus for further study. Although all substantive results depend on this choice, researchers usually pick keywords in ad hoc ways that are far from optimal and usually biased. Most seem to think that keyword selection is easy, since they do Google searches every day, but we demonstrate that humans perform exceedingly poorly at this basic task. We offer a better approach, one that also can help with following conversations where participants rapidly innovate language to evade authorities, seek political advantage, or express creativity; generic web searching; eDiscovery; look‐alike modeling; industry and intelligence analysis; and sentiment and topic analysis. We develop a computer‐assisted (as opposed to fully automated or human‐only) statistical approach that suggests keywords from available text without needing structured data as inputs. This framing poses the statistical problem in a new way, which leads to a widely applicable algorithm. Our specific approach is based on training classifiers, extracting information from (rather than correcting) their mistakes, and summarizing results with easy‐to‐understand Boolean search strings. We illustrate how the technique works with analyses of English texts about the Boston Marathon bombings, Chinese social media posts designed to evade censorship, and others.     

Determinants of Foreign Aid: Rivalry and Domestic Instability

Foreign aid is usually seen as a form of international cooperation. Thus, the expectation is that states engaged in international rivalry with one another should be unlikely to provide each other aid. However, they do provide their enemies aid. We consider how situations of uncertainty influence aid transfers between states. We argue that states may provide each other aid to limit uncertainty from potential regime changes that could lead to war. Such uncertainty is particularly bad for rivals who are prone to militarized conflict. We find that rivals may provide one another foreign aid when one of the countries is experiencing regime-threatening levels of domestic instability. We compare these results to the behavior of nonrivals and find that: Rivals are likely to provide their enemies aid in times of uncertainty; rivals are no less likely to give aid to each other than are nonrivals; and rivals provide more aid during times of instability than do nonrivals.     

Business, State, and Community: 'Responsible Risk Takers', New Labour, and the Governance of Corporate Business

In December 1998, Peter Mandelson MP, one of the principal architects of the Labour Party's victory in the May 1997 general election, dramatically resigned as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. Nevertheless, despite his relatively brief period in that office, Mr. Mandelson left his imprint on policy through the publication in November 1998 of a major White Paper, 'Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge Driven Economy'. The White Paper sets out the New Labour analysis of the national political economy in a globalized world economy and is very much influenced by Mr. Mandelson's experience of the entrepreneurial spirit during his fact-finding visit to the United States of America. This article seeks to chart the relationship between New Labour's desire to foster the development of the corporate sector within a vibrant entrepreneurial culture and the need to ensure that the integrity of the market is preserved in an arena which is seen as inimicable to strong regulatory intervention by the state. As well as mapping New Labour's political rhetoric onto contemporary debates in corporate governance, the analysis will involve an examination of the interface between business practice and morality. In particular, the article will focus upon the role of the conception of company directors as 'responsible risk takers' and the upon the use of name-and-shame sanctions in the development of an entrepreneurial culture in which all corporate enterprises are seen as having a legitimate societal 'licence to operate'.     

Fingerprint Comparison and Adversarialism: The Scientific and Historical Evidence

This article suggests that lawyers and courts are largely oblivious to scientific insights regarding the value and limitations of latent fingerprint evidence. It proceeds through a detailed historical analysis of the way fingerprint evidence has been reported and challenged. It compares legal responses with mainstream scientific research. Our analysis shows that fingerprint evidence is routinely equated with categorical proof of identity notwithstanding scientific warnings that such an approach is ‘indefensible’. We find that legal challenges to latent fingerprint evidence have been uniformly focused on adjectival issues (e.g. compliance with enabling legislation), leaving the validity and accuracy of this subjective comparison technique virtually unexamined since its first reception at the very beginning of the twentieth century. Lack of legal engagement with validity, error and scientific research suggest that adversarial procedures have not worked effectively to secure scientifically reliable expert evidence and that legal personnel struggle with elementary scientific reasoning.     

Vernon Bogdanor: Beyond Brexit: Towards a British Constitution

Liverpool Law Review -     

Assessing the Trivialness, Relevance, and Relative Importance of Necessary or Sufficient Conditions in Social Science

Political scientists of all stripes have proposed numerous necessary or sufficient condition hypotheses. For methodologists a question is how can we assess the importance of these necessary conditions. This article addresses three central questions about the importance of necessary of sufficient conditions. The first concerns de “trivialness” of necessary or sufficient conditions. The second is how much a necessary or sufficient condition is “relevant?” The third important question deals with the relative importance of necessary or sufficient conditions: for example, ifX ₁ andX ₂ are necessary or sufficient conditions, is one more important than the other? The article develops measures to assess the importance of necessary or sufficient conditions in three related contexts: (1) Venn diagram, (2) 2×2 tables, and (3) fuzzy sets. Two empirical examples are discussed at length: (1) Skocpol’sStates and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China and (2) Ragin’s (2000) analysis of the cause of IMF riots.     

A "politically robust" experimental design for public policy evaluation, with application to the Mexican universal health insurance program.

We develop an approach to conducting large-scale randomized public policy experiments intended to be more robust to the political interventions that have ruined some or all parts of many similar previous efforts. Our proposed design is insulated from selection bias in some circumstances even if we lose observations; our inferences can still be unbiased even if politics disrupts any two of the three steps in our analytical procedures; and other empirical checks are available to validate the overall design. We illustrate with a design and empirical validation of an evaluation of the Mexican Seguro Popular de Salud (Universal Health Insurance)program we are conducting. Seguro Popular, which is intended to grow to provide medical care, drugs, preventative services, and financial health protection to the 50 million Mexicans without health insurance, is one of the largest health reforms of any country in the last two decades. The evaluation is also large scale, constituting one of the largest policy experiments to date and what may be the largest randomized health policy experiment ever.