Political Parties, Parliaments and Legislative Speechmaking

Abstract

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The Talk of Norway: a richly annotated corpus of the Norwegian parliament, 1998–2016

“…Our position is that using state-of-the-art, language-specific linguistic pre-processing is a sensible starting point for any research project in this field. However, we find that at least one prominent multi-lingual study (Bäck and Debus 2016) does not use a Norwegian-aware tokenizer for the Norwegian data. We speculate that this kind of choice is rooted in (a) the authors not being aware of available NLP tools or (b) technical challenges in installing, running, and decoding the output of less known tools.…”

“…Clustering and other unsupervised modeling techniques have become a staple of this kind of research. Notable examples in recent years include Eggers and Spirling (2014), who show that the level of conflict in the electoral districts of a given member of parliament (MP) is important for her participation in both voting and speechmaking; Bäck and Debus (2016), who use the Wordscores technique (Laver et al 2003) to explore what causes MPs to participate more or less actively in parliament and why they sometimes deviate from the party line; Lauderdale and Herzog (2016), who demonstrate that a hierarchical approach to the Wordfish algorithm (Slapin and Proksch 2008) greatly improves its quality when applied to parliamentary speeches; and Proksch and Slapin (2015), who study parliamentary speeches from the UK, Germany, and New Zealand, showing that backbencher MPs deviate more from their party line in majoritarian than proportional representation electoral systems.…”

Coordination of legislative speech in times of crisis: Youth unemployment and debates on redistributive policies in the Swedish Riksdag, 1994–2014

“…We should also say something about the specific institutional setting of the parliament that we are studying. As parliamentary rules may clearly influence who is selected or allowed to speak on the floor (Bäck & Debus, ; Cox & McCubbins, ; Proksch & Slapin, ), this is important for the conclusions drawn here. As described by Proksch and Slapin (, p. 96), ‘… all parliaments have rules regulating access to the floor’.…”

“…Sweden represents such a case. The general rules guiding speechmaking in the Swedish Riksdag give MPs a de jure ‘freedom of speech’ (see the Riksdag Act, 2nd chapter), whereas de facto speaking rights are allocated by parties for the larger share of debates (Bäck & Debus, ).…”

“…We further controlled for the gender of an MP and his/her age. We included a dummy variable that identified the party affiliation of the respective MP, so that we could control for the party‐specific salience of welfare, labour and immigration policy (see Bäck & Debus, ). Aside from differences in issue salience, the party dummies controlled for several other technical aspects, such as differences between parties in how speeches were distributed among MPs, differences in ideological cohesiveness or the mere size of parliamentary groups.…”