Sponsor: Taiwan’s National Science Council  (Taiwan NSC98-2917-I-564-147)

This project discusses whether and how quantitative content analysis can contribute to the empirical study of the preferences of different societal groups (informal, formal, online and offline) and the authorities (local and national) in China. Currently, there are in general three ways to conduct content analysis in political sciences research: hand-coded analysis and using statistics programs such as WORDSCORE (in STATA) or WORDFISH (in R). Wordfish, for instance, is the most recent innovation among these three. Wordfish is a statistical scaling model that gauges policy positions of texts on a predefined policy dimension. The researcher can then compare the interests and positions of these societal groups with the final policy output. This provides one way of testing whether authorities are affected by interest articulation, both directly and indirectly, in China or not. In this project, I introduce these methods, discussing and comparing which might be more useful for the empirical investigation of group interests as revealed in Chinese text.

Publications:

Chen, Yu-Wen (2012) Internet and Interest Articulation in China: A Theoretical Re–examination, First Monday 17(1-2). 

Chen, Yu-Wen (2011) Quantitative Content Analysis of Chinese Texts?: A Methodological Note, Journal of Chinese Political Science. DOI: 10.1007/s11366-011-9164-0.

Supplementary materials for the paper on quantitative content analysis:

Wordscores Command

Text Documents

Coding Forms