Session 9 - Spring 2024 will take place on Wednesday, 4:00 PM CEST 29 May 2024, on Zoom Meeting
About The Series
The CIVICA Data Science Seminar Series is a forum that brings together interdisciplinary experts working on novel methodological approaches that leverage new forms of data to address complex societal challenges.
Session 9 - Spring 2024 Details
This talk from Prof. Gloria Gennaro focuses on her research on studying the use of emotion and reason in political discourse. Adopting computational-linguistics techniques to construct a validated text-based scale, we measure emotionality in 6 million speeches given in U.S. Congress over the years 1858-2014. Intuitively, emotionality spikes during times of war and is highest in speeches about patriotism. In the time series, emotionality was relatively low and stable in earlier years but increased significantly starting in the late 1970s. Across Congress Members, emotionality is higher for Democrats, for women, for ethnic/religious minorities, for the opposition party, and for members with ideologically extreme roll-call voting records.
Seminar Speaker
Prof. Gloria Gennaro
Gloria Gennaro is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Public Policy and Data Science at University College London’s Department of Political Science (UCL). Her research focuses on the political economy of advanced democracies in Western Europe and the U.S., which she explores using cutting-edge causal inference techniques with machine learning and natural language processing to improve our theoretical understanding of democratic politics. Her work has been published in The Economic Journal and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Agenda
Welcome Introduction Dr. Virginia Rocha, European University Institute
Setting the scene: Brief intro to the speaker and her talk
Seminar Session Prof. Gloria Gennaro, University College London
Emotion and reason in political language
Research Discussion. Lead Institution
Q&A / Discussion on the research
Announcement
Upcoming seminar in the series and other announcements