Click to subscribe: interest group emails as a source of data
Tóm tắt
Modern interest groups frequently utilize email communications with members as an organizational and informational tool. Furthermore, the nature of email communications—frequent, abundant, and simple to collect—makes them an excellent source of data for studies of interest groups. Nevertheless, despite the substantive importance and methodological possibilities of email communications, few interest group scholars have taken advantage of this data source due to the lack of a comprehensive, systematic database of email texts. This article makes the case for emails as a form of (big) data in the interest group field and discusses best practices for compiling and analyzing datasets of interest group emails. The article also introduces the Political Group Communication Database—the first large scale database of interest group and think tank email communications—and discusses the utility of this (and related) data for answering perennial and newly emergent questions in the interest group field.
Tài liệu tham khảo
Albert, Z. 2019. Partisan Policymaking in the Extended Party Network: The Case of Cap-and-Trade Regulations. Political Research Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912919838326.
Baumgartner, F.R., and B.L. Leech. 1998. Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and Political Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bawn, K., M. Cohen, D. Karol, S. Masket, H. Noel, and J. Zaller. 2012. A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, Policy Demands and Nominations in American Politics. Perspectives on Politics 10 (3): 571–597.
Cormack, L. 2016. Gender and Vote Revelation Strategy in the United States Congress. Journal of Gender Studies 6 (25): 626–640.
Cormack, L. 2017. DCinbox—Capturing Every Congressional Constituent E-newsletter from 2009 Onwards. The Legislative Scholar 2 (1): 27–34.
Cormack, L. 2018. Congress and U.S. Veterans: From the GI Bill to the VA Crisis. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.
Drutman, L., and D.J. Hopkins. 2013. The Inside View: Using the Enron E-mail Archive to Understand Corporate Political Attention. Legislative Studies Quarterly 38 (1): 5–30.
Grimmer, J. 2010. A Bayesian Hierarchical Topic Model for Political Texts: Measuring Expressed Agendas in Senate Press Releases. Political Analysis 18 (1): 1–35.
Hillard, D., S. Purpura, and J. Wilkerson. 2008. Computer-Assisted Topic Classification for Mixed-Methods Social Science Research. Journal of Information Technology & Politics 4 (4): 31–46.
Karpf, D. 2010. Online Political Mobilization from the Advocacy Group’s Perspective. Policy & Internet 2 (4): 1–35.
Karpf, D. 2012. The Move On Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Karpf, D. 2013. How Will the Internet Change American Interest Groups? In New Directions in Interest Group Politics, ed. M. Grossmann, 136–157. Abingdon: Routledge.
Karpf, D. 2016. Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Koger, G., S. Masket, and H. Noel. 2009. Partisan Webs: Information Exchange and Party Networks. British Journal of Political Science 39 (3): 633–653.
Kollman, K. 1998. Outside Lobbying: Public Opinion and Interest Group Strategies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Monroe, B.L., M.P. Colaresi, and K.M. Quinn. 2008. Fightin’ Words: Lexical Feature Selection and Evaluation for Identifying the Content of Political Conflict. Political Analysis 16 (4): 372–403.
Perlmutter, D.D. 2008. Political Blogging and Campaign 2008. International Journal of Press/Politics 13 (2): 160–170.
Pickerill, J. 2003. Cyberprotest: Environmental Activism Online. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Quinn, K.M., B.L. Monroe, M. Colaresi, M.H. Crespin, and D.R. Radev. 2010. How to Analyze Political Attention with Minimal Assumptions and Costs. American Journal of Political Science 54 (1): 209–228.
Rhodes, J.H., and Z. Albert. 2017. The Transformation of Partisan Rhetoric in American Presidential Campaigns, 1952–2012. Party Politics 23 (5): 566–577.
Schlozman, K.L., and J.T. Tierney. 1986. Organized Interests and American Democracy. New York: Harper & Row.
Sim, Y., B. Acree, J.H. Gross, and N.A. Smith 2013. Measuring Ideological Proportions in Political Speeches. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Seattle, WA.
Skocpol, T. 2003. Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Shulman, S.W. 2009. The Case Against Mass E-mails: Perverse Incentives and Low Quality Public Participation in US Federal Rulemaking. Policy & Internet 1 (1): 23–53.
Soroka, S., L. Young, and M. Balmas. 2015. Bad News or Mad News? Sentiment Scoring of Negativity, Fear, and Anger in News Content. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 659 (1): 108–121.
Tang, J., H. Li, Y. Cao, and Z. Tang. 2005. Email Data Cleaning. In Proceedings of SIGKDD 2005. August 21–24, 2005, Chicago, IL. 489–499.
Trammell, K.D., and A.P. Williams. 2008. Beyond Direct Mail: Evaluating Candidate E-Mail Messages in the 2002 Florida Gubernatorial Campaign. Journal of E-Government 1 (1): 105–122.
Vining, R.L. 2011. Grassroots Mobilization in the Digital Age: Interest Group Response to Supreme Court Nominees. Political Research Quarterly 64 (4): 790–802.
Williams, C.B., and G.J. Gulati. 2013. Social Networks in Political Campaigns: Facebook and the Congressional Elections of 2006 and 2008. New Media & Society 15 (1): 52–71.