Dr Radoslaw Zubek receives British Academy award to measure Government Policy with Text Analysis

Congratulations to Dr Radoslaw Zubek, who has received an award from the British Academy for a project entitled 'Measuring Government Policy with Text Analysis'.

Is government policy enhancing business activity or constraining it? Are government regulations becoming more or less business friendly? These and similar questions are ones that businesses ask every day, but social scientists have only limited tools for measuring governments’ policies, except through broadbrush surveys of regulatory environments. We propose to apply the recent advances in computational linguistics to produce detailed estimates of governments’ business policy. We aim to scale impact assessments contained in explanatory memoranda, an overlooked part of the lawmaking process; generate estimates for over 2,400 UK statutory instruments from a 10-year period and cross -validate them against other measures; explore the predictive power of the estimates for the stock market performance of different industries. The outcomes of this project will be of significant value for political scientists, policy analysts, and economists, and will also have impacts beyond academia by providing businesses with highly sought information on business friendliness of government policy.

This project started on 1 April 2016 and will end on 31 May 2017.