Opposition, Rhetoric, and Democratic-Styled Institutions in the Middle East and North Africa

该项目分析中东和北非(“中东和北非地区”)民主式立法机构的基层记录，以回答有关中东和北非地区及其他地区民主和政治反对的性质的基本问题。议会是中东和北非地区政治的一个令人惊讶的重要焦点。尽管该地区显然很重要，但在大多数中东和北非国家，几乎没有对任何类型的议会行为进行任何量化研究。研究人员运用了美国国家科学基金会资助的政治修辞和政治表达动态(“DYNRR”)项目下开发的政治演讲分析技术。民主主张千差万别的政权利用议会和类似机构来调解和控制政治冲突和反对派。通常，这些机构的发言和辩论的详细记录都有保存，而且越来越多地以电子形式在网上提供。从英国下议院到突尼斯的Majlis al-Nuwaab都是这样的例子。该项目收集了许多西方民主国家的此类记录，并开发了这些数据中语言模式的计算和统计模型，有助于确定任何立法机构讨论的政治话题的范围、内容和关系，对不同主题的关注，以及政治冲突的情况。该项目将特别关注埃及、约旦、摩洛哥、伊拉克、巴勒斯坦立法委员会、科威特、阿拉伯联合酋长国、巴林、吉布提、阿尔及利亚、突尼斯和伊朗的议会。来自这些立法机构的数据将用dynRR模型进行分析，以努力了解整个中东和北非地区政治反对的性质，特别是民主和伊斯兰反对的性质。这些数据将公之于众，这将创建首批系统的大规模数据集之一，可广泛用于比较中东和北非国家之间以及与该地区以外国家的政治。

This project analyzes the floor records of democratic-styled legislatures in the Middle East and North Africa ("MENA region") to answer fundamental questions about the nature of democracy and political opposition in the MENA region and beyond. Parliaments are a surprisingly important focus of politics in the MENA region. Despite the obvious importance of the region, virtually no quantitative study, of any kind, of any sort of parliamentary behavior has been conducted in most MENA states. The investigators apply techniques for the analysis of political speech developed under the NSF-funded Dynamics of Political Rhetoric and Political Representation ("DynRR") project. Regimes with widely varying claims to democracy use parliaments and similar institutions to mediate and control political conflict and opposition. Typically, detailed records of the speeches and debates that occur in these institutions are maintained, and increasingly these are provided in electronic form online. Examples range from the British House of Commons to the Tunisian Majlis al-Nuwaab. The DynRR project has collected such records for many western democracies and developed computational and statistical models of language patterns in such data, useful for determining the range, content, and relationships of political topics discussed in any legislature, the attention paid to different topics, and the landscape of political conflict.The project will look specifically at the parliaments of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Iraq, the Palestinian Legislative Council, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Djibouti, Algeria, Tunisia, and Iran. The data from these legislatures will be analyzed with the DynRR models in an effort to understand the nature of political opposition, particular that of democratic and Islamic oppositions, across the MENA region. The data will be made publicly available, creating one of the first systematic large-scale data sets available for broad use in comparing the politics of MENA states with each other and with states outside the region.