The Positions of Irish Parliamentary Parties 1937–2006

Hansen, Martin Ejnar

doi:10.1080/07907180802551076

Cited by 14 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…The substantive meaning of the dimension that our method recovers will depend on political context because the structure of legislators' preferences and their motivations to speak vary by political context. To illustrate this, we examine speech data from two very different institutional contexts: the Irish Da´il as an example of a multiparty parliamentary system with strong voting unity (Hansen 2009), and the U.S. Senate as an example of a two-party system with weaker voting unity. The U.S. Senate example also enables comparisons to spatial measures based on roll-call votes (Poole and Rosenthal 1985;Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers 2004) and campaign donations (Bonica 2014).…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech

Lauderdale

Herzog²

2016

Polit. anal.

139

100

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Table A1 provides an overview of the speeches and debates included in our analysis. In an average electoral period, there were 8,707 speeches across 779 debates in the Irish Dáil and 7,464 speeches across 584 debates in the US Senate. The 112th and 113th Senates stick out at as the two least productive Senates in terms of number of speeches and debates, which is most likely the result of legislative gridlock after the Republican party took over the House in the 2010 election.The average debate in our data set consists of 12 speakers, ranging from a minimum of 5 speakers (our lower threshold) to as many as 73 speakers. At the level of individual speeches, we find an average of 683 and 552 words per speech and legislature. The longest individual speech in our data set is 37,610 words long, which is senator Ted Cruz's (TX-R) 21-hour filibuster speech in September 2013. Sources Additional Analysis of Classification and Uncertainty versus WordfishIn the main text, we show plots of the relationships between individual TDs Wordshoal score and coalition membership, and uncertainty estimates for the 30th Dáil. In Figure A1 we show the corresponding plots for the 29th Dáil. Figure A1: The association between the estimated positions of each legislator and their status as members of the coalition versus opposition, with correlation and local linear smooth, under Wordfish (left) and our approach (right), for the 29th Dáil. In the bottom row, we show the 95% intervals associated with the estimates for each legislator under Wordfish (left) and Wordshoal (right). A5 Dail 29Type of debate Beta root mean square Analysis of Variation in Disagreement by Legislative StageThe Wordshoal model facilitates assessments of the relative extent to which different kinds of debates align with the estimated common dimension. The greater the magnitude of the β j , the greater the extent to which the common dimension predicts speech variation in a given debate. As our summary statistic for β j , we use the root mean square of the β j , weighted by the number of speeches in each debate speeches j .In the paper, we utilize this statistic only for the US Senate, here we assess it across different types of parliamentary debates in Ireland. The majority of debates in our data take place during the second reading of a bill, which is the most important legislative stage after which a bill is formally accepted or rejected. The second most common type are motions, which are an instrument of parliament to scrutinize the work of the government. This includes ad hoc motions on topical issues, seasonal adjournment debates, and (less frequently) A6 motions of confidence in the government or in individual cabinet members (Gallagher 2010). Figure A2 shows the weighted root mean square of β j for motions, second-stage bills, and for debates during the remaining legislative stages, which we group together because of the small number of observations at each stage. We find high government-opposition division during debates on motions, which are mostly used by...

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Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech

Lauderdale

Herzog²

2016

Polit. anal.

139

100

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“…Compared to main parties in other European countries, FF and FG are relatively similar in terms of their policy positions (Weeks, 2009a;Benoit and Laver, 2005), with their primary differences based mainly on historical reasons and tradition. Table A.1 in Appendix A details the full composition of the governments included in our analysis. Party competition in Ireland has been shown to take place mainly between the government and the opposition blocs (Hansen, 2009). This divide is also clearly reflected in legislative debates over the budget, following the annual presentation of a budget by the Minister for Finance.…”

Section: Budgets and The Politics Of Economic Crisismentioning

confidence: 99%

The Most Unkindest Cuts: Speaker Selection and Expressed Government Dissent during Economic Crisis

Herzog

Benoit²

2015

The Journal of Politics

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“…Using speeches to estimate the policy preferences of MPs has a number of advantages when comparing with other approaches for estimating MPs’ policy preferences, such as roll‐call data (see Proksch & Slapin, ). First, we had simply more cases available for many parliaments because recorded votes are rare in parliament while speeches are not (Hansen, ). Second, with regard to the issues covered, we reduced selection bias resulting from roll‐call votes being typically used for more controversial issues (Carruba et al, ).…”

Section: Methods and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2019

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Parliamentary debates and the discussion on different law proposals are a key part of the process of policy making. We argue in this article that a high economic problem pressure in the region an MP represents will affect the MP’s legislative speechmaking. We also hypothesise that parties tend to coordinate their speakers in parliament to display a cohesive profile in the domain of labour, employment and immigration issues, i.e., in issue areas which reflect redistributive policies that are highly salient for almost all parties. We evaluate our expectations based on an analysis of Swedish parliamentary debates on labour, employment and immigration policy during the period between 1994 and 2014. The findings show that parliamentary parties coordinate speechmaking: Those MPs who represent economically troubled districts are less likely to appear in plenary debates, as well as MPs who deviate programmatically from the party line.

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The Positions of Irish Parliamentary Parties 1937–2006

Cited by 14 publications

References 25 publications

Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech

Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech

The Most Unkindest Cuts: Speaker Selection and Expressed Government Dissent during Economic Crisis

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

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