DHB: The Dynamics of Political Representation and Political Rhetoric

DHB：政治代表和政治言论的动态

• 批准号: 0527513
• 负责人: Burt Monroe
• 金额: $ 74.97万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-09-01 至 2007-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0527513&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: DHB; Dynamics; Political; Representation; Rhetoric

The verbatim records of democratic legislatures [or "parliaments", "representative assemblies", "councils", etc.] represent a source of untapped information of unique importance for the study of both democratic societies and language over multiple time scales. For linguists, there is no other place where we have a systematic minute-by-minute record of the spoken word exchanged by a slowly changing and overlapping set of individuals over significant lengths of time. For political scientists, these are also unique sources of deliberations by elected political representatives about the issues of the day. As such, legislative records provide exceptional opportunities for studying the dynamics of language and rhetoric, of democratic politics and representation, and of their interactions, over time scales ranging from minutes to centuries. The record of a single legislature can, however, run to thousands of pages in a single day. It is impossible for any one person to read, much less absorb or analyze, the entire record of a legislature as quickly as it is produced. Increasing availability of these records in electronic form, however, opens possibilities for various forms of computerized analysis. This multidisciplinary project applies and advances recent developments in computer science, information science, and statistics - for natural language processing in particular and statistical learning from massive databases in general - to the analysis of legislative records from democracies worldwide, illuminating important questions of dynamics of political representation and political rhetoric.In the first stage of the project, new corpora (linguistic databases) will be developed from legislative records. Using data reduction techniques including scaling, classification, and summarization, novel statistical and computational methodologies for the dynamic analysis of parliamentary language and parliamentary speakers will be developed and refined.In the second stage of this project, these data and techniques will be applied to questions of importance to linguistics, political science, and social science more generally. In all cases, a wide range of democratic legislatures (from subnational to international), in a wide range of languages, over multiple time scales will be examined. Examples of these important questions include:What can legislative speech tell us about the role of political parties in a democracy? When do they compete, when do they cooperate, when do they polarize, and on what issues?What can legislative speech tell us about democratic representation? How and when are new issues incorporated into the agenda of a legislature? When and whom do representatives lead; when and whom do they follow?What can legislative speech tell us about individual democratic representatives? Do they change their rhetorical behavior in response to citizen preferences, to career motivations, or not at all? Does gender or group identity affect rhetorical choices?What can legislative speech teach us about language itself? How has the political content of language changed over the last two centuries? Do legislative debates actually involve exchanges of information or persuasion?How do events and political rhetoric interact? When do events cause a shift in political rhetoric? When does talk about policy or other political change translate into actual change? Is it predictable?The broader impacts of this multidisciplinary international project include enhanced scientific infrastructure in the form of new software and data for the study of politics and language, enhanced public infrastructure for monitoring what are now impossibly large records of democratic institutions, and new statistical and computational techniques for analyzing large-scale textual databases in general applications. This research will ultimately lead to an increased ability to understand and forecast political and policy changes around the world as well as a greater understanding of how language affects politics, how politics affects language, and how the interaction between them affects democracy.

民主立法机构[或“议会”、“代表大会”、“理事会”等]的逐字记录是未开发信息的来源，对于在多个时间尺度上研究民主社会和语言具有独特的重要性。 对于语言学家来说，没有其他地方可以对一组缓慢变化和重叠的个体在相当长的时间内交换的口语进行系统性的每分钟记录。对于政治学家来说，这些也是民选政治代表对当今问题进行审议的独特来源。 因此，立法记录为研究从几分钟到几个世纪的时间尺度内的语言和修辞、民主政治和代表及其相互作用的动态提供了绝佳的机会。 然而，单个立法机关的记录一天之内可能会达到数千页。 任何人都不可能尽快阅读立法机关的全部记录，更不用说吸收或分析它了。 然而，这些电子记录的可用性不断增加，为各种形式的计算机分析提供了可能性。 这个多学科项目应用并推进了计算机科学、信息科学和统计学的最新发展——特别是自然语言处理和一般从海量数据库中进行的统计学习——来分析全世界民主国家的立法记录，阐明了政治代表性和政治修辞动态的重要问题。在该项目的第一阶段，将从立法记录中开发新的语料库（语言数据库）。 使用包括缩放、分类和总结在内的数据缩减技术，将开发和完善用于议会语言和议会发言人动态分析的新颖统计和计算方法。在该项目的第二阶段，这些数据和技术将更广泛地应用于对语言学、政治学和社会科学重要的问题。 在所有情况下，都将在多个时间尺度上以多种语言审查广泛的民主立法机构（从地方到国际）。 这些重要问题的例子包括：关于政党在民主中的作用，立法演讲可以告诉我们什么？ 他们什么时候竞争，什么时候合作，什么时候两极分化，在什么问题上？立法演讲可以告诉我们关于民主代表的什么？ 新问题如何以及何时纳入立法机关的议程？ 代表何时领导、由谁领导；他们何时、追随谁？立法言论可以告诉我们关于个别民主代表的什么信息？ 他们是否会根据公民偏好、职业动机改变自己的言辞行为，还是根本不改变？ 性别或群体身份会影响修辞选择吗？立法演讲可以教会我们关于语言本身的什么知识？ 过去两个世纪以来，语言的政治内容发生了怎样的变化？ 立法辩论实际上涉及信息交流或说服吗？事件和政治言论如何相互作用？ 事件何时会导致政治言论发生转变？ 谈论政策或其他政治变革何时转化为实际变革？ 它是可预测的吗？这个多学科国际项目的更广泛影响包括以用于政治和语言研究的新软件和数据的形式增强科学基础设施，增强用于监测民主机构目前不可能的大量记录的公共基础设施，以及用于分析一般应用中的大规模文本数据库的新统计和计算技术。 这项研究最终将提高理解和预测世界各地政治和政策变化的能力，并更好地理解语言如何影响政治、政治如何影响语言以及它们之间的相互作用如何影响民主。