Measuring political power is challenging, but newspaper coverage may offer insight. A novel approach leverages nearly 50 million historical pages from U.S. newspapers (1877-1977). We created a 'word frequency' measure to track attention given to various actors and offices across thousands of papers. This method effectively captures power dynamics by showing where politics is discussed.
This dataset enables new studies on political representation over time 🔍. Our analysis validates this approach, demonstrating its correlation with actual influence. Using the measure, we examined how state party committees' prominence shifted historically 📊. The findings highlight a strong link between media presence and political power, offering scholars tools for diverse research contexts.
📰 Data & Methods
* ~50 million pages from 2,700 U.S. newspapers (1877-1977)
* Word frequency-based coverage measure
📊 Key Findings
* Coverage space correlates strongly with political power
* Method effectively tracks shifts in institutional influence
🔑 Why It Matters
Provides a novel, scalable way to quantify political power across time and place. Enhances understanding of how media reflects political reality.
| How Newspapers Reveal Political Power was authored by Pamela Ban, Alexander Fouirnaies, Andrew B. Hall and James M. Snyder, Jr.. It was published by Cambridge in PSR&M in 2019. |
