Reading China: Predicting policy change with machine learning

Description

For the first time in the literature, we develop a quantitative indicator of the Chinese government’s policy priorities over a long period of time, which we call the Policy Change Index (PCI) of China. The PCI is a leading indicator of policy changes that runs from 1951 to the third quarter of 2018, and it can be updated in the future. It is designed with two building blocks: the full text of the People’s Daily — the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China — as input data and a set of machine learning techniques to detect changes in how this newspaper prioritizes policy issues. Due to the unique role of the People’s Daily in China’s propaganda system, detecting changes in this newspaper allows us to predict changes in China’s policies. The construction of the PCI does not require the researcher’s understanding of the Chinese context, which suggests a wide range of applications in other settings, such as predicting changes in other (ex-)Communist regimes’ policies, measuring decentralization in central-local government relations, quantifying media bias in democratic countries, and predicting changes in lawmaker’s voting behavior and in judges’ ideological leaning.