Frontier Culture and Modern Politics in the U.S.: A Data-Driven Approach

SPRING 2018 RESEARCH INCUBATION AWARDEE

PI: Samuel Bazzi, Assistant Professor, Economics
Co-PI: Martin Fiszbein, Professor, Economics

What is the Challenge?
What is the influence of the American Frontier on historical culture and modern politics in the United States? New data shows that the American frontier fostered individualism and opposition to redistribution. In particular, previous work shows that these attributes, as well as support for the Republican Party (particularly in recent elections), are much higher in U.S. locations with more prolonged historical exposure to frontier conditions (defined by isolation, wilderness, and land abundance).

What is the Solution?
The collection of words and phrases associated with a frontier culture that we expect to identify will be an important initial output in our agenda. It will provide rich new descriptive evidence on the American frontier. Using this data in combination with the distinctive frontier demographics identified in our previous work, and novel descriptive analysis of Census data on religions and institutions, we expect to produce a paper providing the first comprehensive data-based characterization of the American frontier. This should be of considerable interest to academics across several disciplines in the historical and social sciences.

What is the Process?
To exploit the tremendous wealth of data embodied in the textual corpora of (i) hundreds of local history books (“county histories”), and (ii) U.S. Congressional Records. Using a text-as-data approach and several tools commonly used in natural language processing and machine learning applications, we will identify from the county histories and historical congressional speeches a distinctive “frontier language,” words and phrases that are statistically associated with exposure to frontier conditions. We will then examine the prevalence of historical frontier language in contemporary political discourse, with a focus on the persistence of frontier culture and its sudden intensification connected with recent trends toward polarization and partisanship.