Free To Choose: A Text Analysis on the Diffusion of Economic Ideas on Politicians

Sara Caicedo-Silva
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Sara Caicedo-Silva: Universidad de los Andes

No 2026-13, Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE

Abstract: This paper examines if and how economic ideas spread across political language. The publication of the TV Series and the book Free to Choose (FC) by Milton and Rosa Friedman in 1980 serves as a tool to understand how economic ideas are popularized and adopted by politicians. Using natural language models, I compute the semantic similarity between FC and the interventions in congressional records from 1975 to 1985 to assess the change in political debate speeches in the US. I find that Democratic legislators increasingly adopted the rhetorical framing of FC, reaching or even surpassing Republicans in the similarity of their speeches relative to FC. This convergence was especially strong in debates on macroeconomic policy and foreign trade. These results suggest that FC amplified existing liberal ideas and transformed them into a shared language of both advocacy and critique within Congress.

Keywords: Political Discourse; Text-as-Data; Semantic Similarity; U.S. Congress (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B25 B41 D72 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56
Date: 2026-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe and nep-pol
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Published in Documentos CEDE - Universidad de los Andes

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:col:000089:022309

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