Themes and Topics in Parliamentary Oversight Hearings: A New Direction in Textual Data Analysis

Abstract

This paper contributes to the growing empirical work on deliberation in legislatures by proposing a novel approach to analysing parliamentary hearings using both thematic and topic modelling textual analysis software. We explore variations in deliberative quality across economic policy type (fiscal policy, monetary policy and financial stability) and across parliamentary chambers (Commons and Lords) in UK select committee oversight hearings during the 2010–2015 Parliament. Our overall focus is not only to suggest a multi-method approach to the textual analysis of parliamentary data, but also to explore more substantive aspects of parliamentary oversight, such as: (1) the extent to which oversight varies between unelected and elected policy makers; and (2) whether parliamentarians conduct oversight more forcefully or more along partisan lines when they are challenging fellow politicians as opposed to central bank officials. Our findings suggest consistent differences in deliberative styles between types of hearings (fiscal, monetary, financial stability) and between chambers (Commons, Lords).

Central Banks in Parliaments: A Text Analysis of the Parliamentary Hearings of the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve

“…Second, we enrich the literature on central bank communication. While existing research mostly looks at central bank announcements to the public through press conferences (Altavilla et al, 2019;Lamla and Vinogradov, 2019), publications (Bholat et al, 2019;Hansen et al, 2019;Born et al, 2014), speeches (Neuhierl and Weber, 2019), minutes of their meetings (Hansen et al, 2017;Apel and Blix-Grimaldi, 2012), our work is the first to explore the communication between central banks and parliaments in a comparative setting (Schonhardt-Bailey, 2013 andSanders et al, 2018 examine the parliamentary hearings of the Fed and the BoE respectively to address different questions).…”

“…Few exceptions in the political science literature are Schonhardt-Bailey (2013) and Sanders et al (2018), who analyse these text sources focusing on specific case studies, namely the Fed and the BoE respectively.…”

Local voters have their reasons. Mapping voting motives in local elections in Belgium

“…In a nutshell, the method assigns a non‐predetermined number of classes representing co‐occurring sets of words, the meaning of which must be interpreted afterwards by the researchers. The method has been used in various political science applications in recent years (Duchesne & Van Ingelgom, 2008; Bailey & Schonhardt‐Bailey, 2008; Weal et al, 2012; Ratinaud & Marchand, 2015; Sanders et al, 2017). In this regard, the contribution of Defacqz et al (2019) is similar to the approach chosen here as the authors also analyzed the answers to an open‐ended question posed to voters and candidates in the 2014 regional, federal, and European elections in Belgium.…”

Deep Learning for Political Science

“…Separate elements into groups ('clustering'): this is similar to classification, only the groups are not known beforehand, hence this task usually involves unsupervised learning. Sanders et al (2017) and Preoţiuc-Pietro et al (2017) are examples of the potential use of clustering to better understand political ideologies and parliamentary topics.…”