My work involves the application of new methods to the study of interest groups and influence in the making of regulatory policy. In particular I am interested in the ways in which recent advances in quantitative data analysis, such as topic modeling and other automated discourse analysis processes can help to make sense of how interest groups behave and the conditions under which they are most influential. While these tools have been popular among computer scientists for some time they are just beginning to be deployed by political scientists and I am interested in both the advantages and limits of these tools. In my own work on the subject of financial regulation I am currently deploying tools from social network analysis to understand the prevalence of interest group coalitions in financial sector lobbying; topic modeling Federal Reserve speeches to understand how central bankers react to political pressure, and using various other tools of automated discourse analysis to examine the extent of conflict among interest groups as they engage in advocacy over regulatory policy.
