The Oxford Computational Political Science Group (OCPSG) is pleased to announce its speaker event w/ Prof Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, FBA and Amara Otero-Salgado. They will be presenting their paper ‘Measuring Empirically the Legal Conflicts over U.S. Public Lands from 1960 to 2024’. It seeks to better understand how conflicting views over public lands have evolved over time, namely by examining empirically a newly developed dataset to assess competing narratives that have driven legal battles in the U.S. in the modern era of environmental policy. The paper uses a Large Language Model to build a dataset of 5500 cases of litigation on U.S. public lands from 1960 to 2024. From these data, they analyse trends in the evolution of arguments that have won and lost, how these arguments are used by nongovernmental and governmental actors to further (or block) advances in environmental protections, and finally, whether the longer-term trends in these conflicts reveal a movement more towards unifying or towards polarizing Americans around the issue of protection for public lands.

Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey is Professor in Political Science and Fellow of the British Academy, and served as Head of the LSE Government Department from 2019-2022. Her research interests are in political economy, legislatures, deliberation and accountability. She is author and editor of several books on trade policy and monetary policy, including Deliberative Accountability in Parliamentary Committees (OUP, 2022), Deliberating American Monetary Policy: A Textual Analysis (MIT Press, 2013), and From the Corn Laws to Free Trade (MIT Press, 2006). She has published many articles on nineteenth century trade policy, as well as on more contemporary topics, like the use of nonverbal communication in UK parliamentary committee hearings, political rhetoric on US national security by George Bush and John Kerry, civil religion in presidential rhetoric, and US Senate debates on partial-birth abortion. She is currently working on a new book project, which explores conflicts over public lands in the US and other industrialized countries.

Amara Jane Otero Salgado is an MSc student in Data Science at LSE, having completed her undergraduate degree in Politics and Data Science also at LSE. Her research interests lie in bridging quantitative methods with the social sciences. In particular, she seeks to employ statistical techniques in areas of social science research which have typically been qualitative or have employed only minimal application of quantitative methods. She also has a strong interest in studying areas of algorithmic fairness and online censorship.

The hybrid event takes place in the Skills Lab at the Manor Road Building on Friday, 20 March, at 14:30. It is open to both Oxford and non-Oxford students and researchers, who also have the option to join the event online.

OCPSG is a non-partisan research initiative supported by Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations. We advance the use of computational methods—including machine learning and AI—in political science and policy through an interdisciplinary, collaborative environment. Founded in December 2024, OCPSG has grown into an international research network applying rigorous, evidence-based computational approaches to tackle complex global challenges and high-impact research questions.