Domesticating Wealth Inequality (OFAI Lecture by Scott Patterson)
Channel: Austrian Research Institute for AI (OFAI)
Date: 2022-07-18

Domesticating Wealth Inequality: Hybrid Discourse Analysis of UN General Assembly Speeches, 1971–2018 
Scott Patterson, M.A.I.S., McGill University, Canada
29 June 2022

The rise of wealth inequality is well-documented, yet robust calls for redistribution have yet to emerge from within the UN system. How can this be? We argue that discourse on wealth inequality has been gradually, but pervasively, "domesticated" in diplomatic venues. We advance this argument through a hybrid discourse analysis of UN General Assembly speeches that adopts complementary machine learning and interpretive techniques. Our study demonstrates the usefulness of hybrid discourse analysis for several tasks in time-series text analysis. First, we use a multiclass Support Vector Machine to discover rhetorical "eras" that emerge in debates over time. Second, we use Concept Mover Distance – a distributed, pre-trained language model – to estimate the extent of engagement with rhetorical tropes that are relevant to wealth inequality. These tropes were selected through an interpretive analysis of exemplary external texts. Third, we cluster states based on patterns of engagement with key tropes, illustrating changes to the rhetorical topography over time. Beyond our substantive contribution, we aim to close the gap between interpretive and computational text analysis and to demonstrate the advantage of placing these approaches on an even footing.