RELATIO: Text Semantics Capture Political and Economic Narratives

TL;DR

RELATIO is an unsupervised tool that extracts and analyzes latent political and economic narratives from large text corpora, revealing their structure, sentiment, and polarization over time.

Contribution

It introduces a novel software package that identifies entity groups and relations in text, enabling detailed analysis of political and economic narratives.

Findings

Reveals polarization and sentiment trends in Congressional discourse

Maps interconnectedness of political narratives over decades

Highlights narrative dynamics and their influence on policy

Abstract

Social scientists have become increasingly interested in how narratives -- the stories in fiction, politics, and life -- shape beliefs, behavior, and government policies. This paper provides an unsupervised method to quantify latent narrative structures in text documents. Our new software package RELATIO identifies coherent entity groups and maps explicit relations between them in the text. We provide an application to the United States Congressional Record to analyze political and economic narratives in recent decades. Our analysis highlights the dynamics, sentiment, polarization, and interconnectedness of narratives in political discourse.