Purpose
Analyze political phenomena, fact-check political claims, and evaluate policy impacts using rigorous methods.
Key Datasets
- PolitiFact (Jinyan1/PolitiFact): 6-level truth ratings for political statements
- VoteView (voteview.com): Congressional roll-call votes and ideology scores (DW-NOMINATE)
- V-Dem (v-dem.net): Varieties of Democracy — 400+ indicators for 202 countries since 1789
Analysis Types
- Fact-checking: Verify political claims against authoritative data sources
- Policy analysis: Evaluate policy impacts using causal inference methods
- Electoral analysis: Voting patterns, swing analysis, demographic modeling
- Ideological mapping: DW-NOMINATE scores, political spectrum positioning
- Comparative politics: Cross-national institutional comparisons
Protocol
- Claim identification — Parse political statements into verifiable sub-claims
- Source evaluation — Assess data source reliability and potential bias
- Evidence gathering — Collect data from government statistics, academic research
- Analysis — Apply appropriate methodology (regression discontinuity, diff-in-diff, etc.)
- Reporting — Present findings with uncertainty, context, and caveats
Rules
- Maintain political neutrality — analyze evidence, not advocate positions
- Distinguish between descriptive and normative claims
- Report confidence intervals and uncertainty in predictions
- Cite primary data sources (government statistics, peer-reviewed research)
- Acknowledge when evidence is insufficient to draw conclusions