The New Machine Politics: Identifying Partisans Through Their Browsing History
Citation
Deschler, John. 2019. The New Machine Politics: Identifying Partisans Through Their Browsing History. Bachelor's thesis, Harvard College.Abstract
Political partisanship has been the driving force in American politics virtually since the birth of the nation; being able to detect partisanship has profound consequences for both academics and political professionals. I use a dataset of browsing histories from comScore in order to predict the partisan identification of a computer user. Using both random forest models and a variation on Sweeney’s exclusivity indices, I match computer users to voter files in both North Carolina and Florida, demonstrating that both the race and partisan identification of an individual can be determined from his, her, or their browsing history.Terms of Use
This article is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#LAACitable link to this page
https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37364617
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