Measuring Policy Positions from Text
Guest Lecture — University of Bologna, PhD Cycle 41
1 About this lecture
This notebook accompanies a guest lecture delivered at the University of Bologna for the PhD Programme in Political and Social Sciences on measuring policy positions from political text, using Italian parliamentary speeches as a running example.
The lecture walks through five methods, from simple Bag of Words approaches to LLMs:
| Module | Topic |
|---|---|
| Pre-requisites | R packages, Python, and OLLAMA setup |
| Module 1 | Text as data & bag-of-words |
| Module 2 | Wordscores & Wordfish |
| Module 3 | Latent Semantic Scaling |
| Module 4 | Generative LLMs via OLLAMA |
| Module 5 | BERT models (ManifestoBerta) |
2 How to use
Each chapter is also a standalone Quarto notebook. You can render any single module on its own with quarto render 0X_<name>.qmd, or build the entire book with quarto render.
The slide decks shown during the lecture live separately in the slides/ folder of the source repository.