label-light-diagnostic

This paper proposes a label-light measurement diagnostic to evaluate whether popular text analysis methods (dictionaries, topic models, embeddings, LLMs) capture substantive stance versus symbolic rhetoric in entrepreneurial-discourse measurement, using a corpus of 80 Chinese SOE speeches and a natural experiment with same-company different-speaker pairs. The authors find that zero-shot LLMs show higher sensitivity but a significant portion of the effect may be due to speaker idiolect rather than substantive stance.