Research Assistant – Exploring Right-Wing Economic Ideas in The World, Koret scholar

November 2024 – Present

One of the harder questions in contemporary political economy is whether the economic ideas driving right-wing populist movements across Europe and the United States are actually new, or whether they're older frameworks dressed up in new language. As a named researcher and Koret Scholar under Associate Professor Roger Schoenman, I'm contributing to a forthcoming book that takes that question seriously. The research required building a large corpus from scratch, so I collected, scraped, and translated 80+ political manifestos and parliamentary speeches across 9 countries including Poland, Hungary, Italy, France, Germany, and the US, pulling from databases like the Manifesto Project, ParlLawSpeech, ItaParlCorpus, ParisParl, and GovInfo and translating non-English documents using DeepL. I then ran spectral topic modeling in R and RStudio, testing models from K=4 to K=7 to find the most interpretively stable solution, which turned out to be K=4. The output is a set of longitudinal visualizations that trace how economic and social issue emphasis has shifted across parties and countries over time, helping to answer whether what we're seeing is genuine ideological change or something more familiar.

More of Prof. Shoenman’s work: https://politics.ucsc.edu/faculty/index.php?uid=rschoenm

Manifesto Project Database: https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu/

From left to right: Professor Roger Schoenman, Kayson Tang