Party Polls Dataset

A web-scraped dataset of polls from past and next elections in multiple European countries 

with Stefan Müller and Jihed Ncib

Mapping Higher Education Politics: A New Dataset Linking Congressional Speech, Constituency Attributes, and University Characteristics

Introducing a novel dataset for the study of higher education politics, this research note links a full corpus of U.S. House floor speeches from 2011 to 2024 with specific legislator traits (party, committee, and career background), constituency demographics (median income, age, educational attainment, and Pell reliance), and local university characteristics (presence, size, rank, tuition, and public/private status). By bridging these institutional, demographic, and rhetorical variables, the dataset enables empirical research on congressional polarization, distributive politics, and issue framing.

Higher Education Issue Saliency and Definition: Differing Policy Dimensions

This project utilizes advanced natural language processing and transformer-based topic modeling (e.g., BERTopic) to systematically map the multidimensional policy discourse surrounding higher education in the U.S. Congress. By extracting and clustering latent themes from a decade-long corpus of 3.7 million sentences of legislative discourse, the research computationally defines distinct policy dimensions, such as workforce development, student debt, and institutional accountability. This data-driven framework allows for a quantitative assessment of how the saliency and rhetorical definition of these specific issues shift across varying political, temporal, and institutional contexts.

From Consensus to Contestation: The Politicization of Higher Education in Congressional Rhetoric

Utilizing computational text analysis of over 3.7 million congressional sentences, this project tracks how higher education evolved from a bipartisan consensus issue into a primary site of partisan conflict. The findings reveal that while Republicans asymmetrically drive this politicization, the presence of concrete local institutions, such as universities or constituencies heavily reliant on federal aid, acts as a moderating force to protect local economic stakeholders. Ultimately, this research highlights how local material interests and the “electoral connection” continue to mitigate the nationalization of polarized rhetoric in Congress.

Issue Ownership in Committee: Partisan Patterns in Higher Education Policy Proposals

This project investigates the dynamics of partisan ‘issue ownership’ in congressional higher education policy by analyzing bill sponsorship and co-sponsorship networks from 1974 to 2024. Utilizing a large language model (LLM) approach grounded in a classic public policy framework, the research classifies legislative proposals into distributive, regulatory, and redistributive dimensions to model how legislator attributes drive the specific types of bills introduced. Ultimately, this study assesses whether higher education remains a domain of bipartisan distributive policymaking or if it has fractured into highly contested, partisan sub-issues.