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New Way to Gauge Lawmakers' Beliefs: Tracking Online Speech Since 2006
Insights from the Field
religious rhetoric
Internet Archive .gov captures
time-variant measure
regression analysis
American Politics
BJPS
1 R files
2 datasets
Dataverse
Archived Attributes: An Internet-text Approach to Measuring Legislator Attitudes and Behavior was authored by Emily Kalah Gade, Sarah Dreier, John Wilkerson and Anne Washington. It was published by Cambridge in BJPS in 2021.

This study introduces a novel method to measure federal legislators' religiosity by analyzing their use of religious rhetoric on official congressional websites between 2006 and 2012.

Data & Methods: Using Internet Archive captures (.gov domain), the authors developed a scalable, time-variant metric tracking religious language over time.

Key Findings Validity: The approach demonstrates reliability for measuring changes in legislators' public religiosity expressions during this period.

Methodological Contribution: Leveraging archived internet data offers cost-effective insights into political communication that surpass traditional expensive measures.

Wider Impact: This work models how big data archives can revolutionize political science research by enabling longitudinal analysis of legislative communications.

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British Journal of Political Science
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