Scholars increasingly rely on online platforms to extract latent political concepts from texts. This paper introduces a novel approach—crowdsourced pairwise comparisons—to validate human coding of political texts.
Data & Methods: We test the framework using U.S. Senate campaign ads and State Department human rights reports, employing free software for aggregation.
Key Findings: The method effectively combines coder intuition with computational reliability, addressing concerns about non-expert biases in previous studies.
Why It Matters: Our open-source tool enhances accessibility to text analysis techniques across political research applications.
