Ideological Division in Legislative Speech on Technology
In Prep
Yunus Emre Tapan · Beatrice Magistro · Sophie Borwein · Bart Bonikowski · Michael Alvarez
Technology policy — AI, semiconductors, automation, energy, military systems — is usually cast as a rare domain of bipartisan pragmatism, even as polarization reaches nearly everything else Congress touches. So does the way legislators speak about technology tell the same story, or does ideological division register there too? We work from the full text of the U.S. Congressional Record (Volumes 141–170, 1995–2025 — some 680,000 floor-speech documents), using LLM-assisted classification — validated against human-labeled samples — to identify technology discourse at scale, and then measure how positions cluster and diverge across parties and over time.
Analysis in progress; findings to follow.