The widening partisan gap in legislative support for civil rights in the United States (opens in new tab)

The history of civil rights legislation offers a window into how American democracy codified social justice over time, and whether this process unfolded gradually or through punctuated shifts. Sixty years after the civil rights movement, we apply natural language processing to legislative archives to track how civil rights has evolved as a policy domain. We show that civil rights legislation has become more common, but also has diverged by party. Divergence accelerated during the early 1990s ...