James R. Sullivan

Politics by Numbers: Plato’s Shadows Provide a Ray of Hope?

By |2023-11-29T14:10:29-10:00November 29th, 2023|

By James R. Sullivan, CFA Abstract: The stories that a country tells itself and others help us to understand how that country sees itself, its place in the world, and its ambitions. Sentiment analysis applied to these stories also provides evidence that countries prepare the narrative ground in advance of military action in similar ways as they prepare the physical battleground. This dynamic was especially apparent prior to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. This paper provides updated sentiment analysis for one ongoing and one potential conflict. Russian sentiment towards Ukraine, as expressed in domestic language media, fell precipitously in [...]

Politics by Numbers: Counting Plato’s Shadows

By |2022-11-21T15:01:57-10:00November 21st, 2022|

By James R. SullivanWSD-Handa Fellow Abstract / Summary Stories are at the core of our understanding of humanity, as well as central to many concepts at the heart of International Relations theory. The Chinese Communist Party has been adept at story telling for many years and for many purposes inclusive of intra-elite competition, maintenance of regime support, and tactical negotiations. These stories become especially critical during periods of regime transition, as we witnessed during the recently concluded Twentieth National Party Congress. This paper leverages Natural Language Processing techniques applied to the GDELT database to quantify tones expressed on a variety of [...]

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