Predicting United States policy outcomes with Random Forests
This work addresses the problem of understanding and predicting policy outcomes for political scientists and researchers, though it is incremental by applying an existing machine learning method to a known dataset.
The paper tackled the problem of predicting U.S. policy outcomes using Random Forests on a dataset of policy preferences, achieving approximately 70% balanced accuracy on holdout test sets, which is a 20% gain over baseline chance. This result highlights the significant influence of wealthy players and powerful interest groups in policy outcomes.
Two decades of U.S. government legislative outcomes, as well as the policy preferences of rich people, the general population, and diverse interest groups, were captured in a detailed dataset curated and analyzed by Gilens, Page et al. (2014). They found that the preferences of the rich correlated strongly with policy outcomes, while the preferences of the general population did not, except via a linkage with rich people's preferences. Their analysis applied the tools of classical statistical inference, in particular logistic regression. In this paper we analyze the Gilens dataset using the complementary tools of Random Forest classifiers (RFs), from Machine Learning. We present two primary findings, concerning respectively prediction and inference: (i) Holdout test sets can be predicted with approximately 70% balanced accuracy by models that consult only the preferences of rich people and a small number of powerful interest groups, as well as policy area labels. These results include retrodiction, where models trained on pre-1997 cases predicted "future" (post-1997) cases. The 20% gain in accuracy over baseline (chance), in this detailed but noisy dataset, indicates the high importance of a few wealthy players in U.S. policy outcomes, and aligns with a body of research indicating that the U.S. government has significant plutocratic tendencies. (ii) The feature selection methods of RF models identify especially salient subsets of interest groups (economic players). These can be used to further investigate the dynamics of governmental policy making, and also offer an example of the potential value of RF feature selection methods for inference on datasets such as this.