This article exploits two newspaper archives to track economic policy uncertainty in Spain from 1905–1945. We find that the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 was anticipated by a striking upward level shift of uncertainty in both newspapers. We study the reasons for this shift through a natural language processing method, which allows us to leverage expert opinion to track specific issues in our newspaper archives. We find a strong empirical link between increasing uncertainty and the rise of divisive political issues like socio-economic conflict. This holds even when exploiting content differences between the two newspapers in our corpus.

中文翻译：

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经济不确定性和分裂政治：来自西班牙的证据

本文利用两份报纸档案来追踪 1905 年至 1945 年西班牙经济政策的不确定性。我们发现，两家报纸的不确定性水平显着上升，预示着 1936 年内战的爆发。我们通过自然语言处理方法研究这种转变的原因，这使我们能够利用专家意见来跟踪报纸档案中的具体问题。我们发现，不确定性的增加与社会经济冲突等分裂性政治问题的出现之间存在着密切的实证联系。即使在利用我们语料库中两种报纸之间的内容差异时，这一点也成立。