Pamela Ban and Jaclyn Kaslovsky speaking on Some Politics is Local: Local Orientation in the U.S. Congress.
The Hoover Institution hosts a seminar series on Using Text as Data in Policy Analysis, co-organized by Steven J. Davis and Justin Grimmer. These seminars will feature applications of natural language processing, structured human readings, and machine learning methods to text as data to examine policy issues in economics, history, national security, political science, and other fields.
Our 18th meeting features a conversation with Pamela Ban and Jaclyn Kaslovsky on Some Politics is Local: Local Orientation in the U.S. Congress on Tuesday, April 4, 2023 from 9:00AM – 10:30AM PT.
Pamela Ban is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California–San Diego. Her research focuses on American political institutions and covers legislative politics, Congress, interest groups, and information dynamics within federal policy making. Her current work uses large, novel datasets and text-as-data methods to understand how and why political actors such as legislators, bureaucrats, and interest groups search for and exchange information. By revealing how institutions shape information flows, her work yields new insights on how information is wielded as a political tool and who influences the production of policy. Ban’s research has been published in the American Political Science Review, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Business and Politics, and Political Science Research and Methods
Jaclyn Kaslovsky is an assistant professor of political science at Rice University. Her research focuses on Congress, representation, and women in politics. In her current work, she analyzes how members of Congress choose to allocate their resources, including their time and staff, and the effect of these choices on the quality of representation. In doing so, she seeks to provide an update to the traditional “home style” literature that explains congressional members’ attention to their home districts. Her other projects leverage unique time series and congressional speech datasets to explore the consequences of increasing diversity in Congress for representation and how legislator behavior has evolved over time. Her work has appeared in outlets such as the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Politics
Steven J. Davis is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He studies business dynamics, labor markets, and public policy. He advises the U.S. Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, co-organizes the Asian Monetary Policy Forum and is co-creator of the Economic Policy Uncertainty Indices, the Survey of Business Uncertainty, and the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes.
Justin Grimmer is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. His current research focuses on American political institutions, elections, and developing new machine-learning methods for the study of politics.
