The legislative agenda in Ireland, 1922–2021

Energy agendas: A longitudinal analysis of Finnish parliamentary debates

“…Considering this, we would encourage researchers to combine various methodologies in the future—for example, topic modelling of large sets of textual data together with a more nuanced contextual analysis. However, as mentioned above, the advantage of topic modelling compared to interviews or manual coding and/or the use of predefined categories (cf., Gava et al, 2017; Little, 2023) is its comprehensiveness. No relevant part of the parliamentary speech escapes the researcher's attention while the method provides a richer account of policy debates, revealing agendas that might otherwise remain uncovered.…”

“…We argue that existing research on parliamentary agenda formation, even when carefully coding debate transcripts from long periods of time (e.g., Little, 2023) or when systematically analysing members' formal interventions (Gava et al, 2017), is somewhat limited in grasping the full spectrum of parliamentary speeches. In other words, by limiting research to institutionally or otherwise predefined debate categories, these studies leave out a potentially large amount of parliamentary talk.…”

Public Policy Accumulation in Ireland: the Changing Profile of Ministerial Departments 1922–2022

“…As Little (2023) identifies, the policy priorities of Irish governments have experienced considerable change over time. This is reflected in changes to the administrative system, both in terms of its size (as measured by personnel and budget) but also the number of discrete organisational units, many of which have had explicitly advisory, regulatory or implementation roles in terms of policy.…”