Page Not Found
Page not found. Your pixels are in another canvas.
Sitemap
A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there is an XML version available for digesting as well.
Pages
Page not in menu
This is a page not in th emain menu
Publications
Publications
Posts
Public Responses to Supreme Court Leak on Twitter
Published:
Below are a small collection of graphics illustrating unique features of the online political discourse that emerged in the wake of a leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson, which would effectively overrule the Court’s landmark opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973). A few notes:
Transcripts of Ketanji Brown Jackson Hearing
Published:
Attached are transcriptions for the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson (D.C. Circuit), which are available in (.rdata) format. It was constructed using C-SPAN’s (rough) closed captioning transcriptions of the hearing’s proceedings, which I was able to access by referencing the relevant hyperlink for each portion of the hearing and converting it to a plain text (.txt) file.
Timelapse of Supreme Court Majority Coalitions and Opinion Authorship
Published:
Below is a bar chart illustrating the propensity for Supreme Court justices to join majority opinion coalitions during their tenures between 1791 and 2020. Each iteration represents the number of times a justice joined a majority and ends with their termination from the Court. The second video illustrates the same concept but focuses on the propensity for justices to serve as majority opinion authors. Each were created using Python (bar_chart_race) and replication materials can be provided on request.
An Optimally Classified Supreme Court: Teaching Optimal Classification as an Introduction to Models of Spatial Voting
Published:
This work provides an overview of optimal classification, a rank-ordered scaling procedure that can be used for voters in any parliamentary voting environment. Originally developed by Keith Poole as a computational approach to scaling members of the US Congress (see Spatial Models of Parliamentary Voting 2005), I translate the approach to scaling justices of the Supreme Court. At its core, optimal classification in a single dimension uses a cutting point procedure and a legislative procedure to optimally rank order voters (though it can theoretically be applied to more than one dimension). The benefits of the approach are found largely in its ease of implementation. Unlike statistical approaches (e.g., NOMINATE or Martin-Quinn Scores), the procedure can be completed with pen and paper if the number of votes and voters is small enough. However, using a computational approach (as opposed to statistical) means that the rank ordering will not produce cardinal distances - merely an optimal rank ordering. I ultimately address how the procedure can serve as a good tool for introducing students to models of spatial voting.
active
How to Train Your Stochastic Parrot: Large Language Models for Political Texts
Published:
Large language models pre-trained on massive corpora of text from the Internet have transformed the way that computer scientists approach natural language processing over the past five years. But these “foundation models” have yet to see widespread adoption in the social sciences, partly due to their novelty and upfront costs. In this paper, we demonstrate that such models can be effectively applied to a wide variety of text-as-data tasks in political science–including sentiment analysis, ideological scaling, and topic modeling. In a series of pre-registered analyses, this approach outperforms conventional supervised learning methods without the need for extensive data pre-processing or large sets of labeled training data. And performance is comparable to expert and crowd-coding methods at a fraction of the cost. We explore the accuracy-cost tradeoff associated with adding more model parameters, and discuss how best to adapt and validate the models for particular applications.
Recommended citation: Ornstein, J. T., Blasingame, E. N., & Truscott, J. S. (2022). How to Train Your Stochastic Parrot: Large Language Models for Political Texts.
packages
portfolio
Portfolio item number 1
Published:
Short description of portfolio item number 1
Portfolio item number 2
Published:
Short description of portfolio item number 2
publications
The Supreme Spectacle: An Analysis of Public Attendance at the Supreme Court
Published in Justice System Journal, 2022
While many are aware that the Supreme Court allocates seats for the public to view oral arguments, substantive analyses that have measured the motivations for attendance are lacking. I analyze who attends oral arguments using a descriptive approach with a novel dataset of public attendance at Supreme Court oral arguments during the 2019 term. A concurrent assessment of interviews conducted on argument days illustrates notable differences among the motivations of prospective attendees. I conclude by noting that although the linkage between latent case salience and the demand for admission to arguments is not neatly discernable, attendance at the Supreme Court offers an interesting divergence from perceptions of attendance in a traditional courtroom setting.
Recommended citation: Jake S. Truscott (2022) The Supreme Spectacle: An Analysis of Public Attendance at the Supreme Court, Justice System Journal, 43:3, 470-481, DOI: 10.1080/0098261X.2022.2107964
Analyzing the Rhetoric of Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings
Published in Journal of Law and Courts, 2023
Supreme Court confirmation hearings place the often-reclusive institution in the public spotlight and afford members of the Senate Judiciary Committee the ability to pursue important personal and party goals. I construct and evaluate a measure of rhetorical sentiment that considers the positive and negative behaviors of committee members during Supreme Court confirmation hearings between 1971 and 2020. While some observers have pointed to the evolving dynamics of confirmation hearings as being the result of key inflection points, I find that these events alone do not explain rhetorical behaviors. Instead, my results suggest that rhetorical behaviors have been predominately mediated by structures of party control and the balance of interbranch political power since at least the 1970s. I conclude by noting how these behaviors can further deteriorate the public’s perceptions that the Court remains insulated from the contentious political environment.
Recommended citation: Truscott, J. (2023). Analyzing the Rhetoric of Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings. Journal of Law and Courts, 1-22. doi:10.1017/jlc.2023.2