Insights from a Student Attending an Open Lecture

Posted on: 6 June 2024 by Arthur Fonseca Vasco in 2024 posts

At the beginning of May, I had the opportunity to attend an Open Lecture by Dr Ruth Carlitz, from the University of Amsterdam and hosted by the Department of Politics at the University of Liverpool.

This ongoing research project aims to understand how disagreements over policy goals reflect partisan cleavages in the United States and how this politicisation of policy goals conditions foreign aid.  

Dr Carlitz and her co-authors use Natural Language Processing (NLP), a type of AI, to extract information on politicisation from the publicly available reports by the US-based Development Experience Clearinghouse. This is an exciting methodology applied to political science given all the new buzz artificial intelligence technology has had over the past year. As a final-year politics student, I was particularly interested in this lecture because of the NLP methodology. It was one of the tools I considered using for my final dissertation. As I consider the different possibilities of a future career after university, learning more about how Dr Carlitz used NLP was an extremely valuable experience and I will consider this further if I decide on postgraduate study.  

Another interesting research design discussion was the proposal of a refined measure of politicisation by looking at the similarity of keywords in the policy papers with terms more frequently associated with Republican or Democrat political language. If these papers use the language associated with either of those parties, it is quantified as more politicised. This method was an interesting way to deal with the issues of measuring politicisation, however, not all of the University of Liverpool academic audience agreed and there were interesting discussions in the panel Q&A about whether this new research on politicisation is rather just a matter of issue saliency. 

Engaging with this ongoing research project has deepened my understanding of the challenges in policy evaluation, a topic that is in the curriculum of my final year as a Politics student. Combining these topics with the new AI NLP advancements in research methodology provided me with a useful toolkit I could use in the future that will definitely bring new scientific insights to the policy and scholarly spheres.