{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.019644527595884004, 'fraction_numerical': 0.002806361085126286, 'mean_word_length': 5.369047619047619, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Re-Defining Political Participation through Item Response Theory

A common approach for creating a dependent variable of political participation is simply to aggregate a series of binary questions that measure engagement - the more actions an individual conducts indicates a higher probability for that individual to participate. Two assumptions are implicit in this approach: (1) The levels of difficulty for engaging in any of the actions are equivalent and (2) each act tells us the same amount of information about an individual’s likelihood to participate. Unfortunately, however, all acts are not the same. This paper attempts to deviate from this classical approach and account for differences among citizens’ actions. Using insight from Item Response Theory, I implement a two-parameter logistic model to obtain a new dependent variable for participation, 0, which is conditional on a discrimination and difficult parameter. This new approach offers a more accurate measure of behavior and reshapes our understanding of the factors that influence participation.