Measuring Political Debate: Responsiveness, Influence, and Rhetoric in Parliamentary Texts

讨论和辩论是民主政治的核心。当被问及英国的政治时，许多人会想起首相站在信箱前，与反对党领袖就热点问题发生冲突的画面。同样，政治日程表上的许多关键事件--预算、女王的演讲--都围绕着下议院高调的大型辩论展开。然而，除了这些有限的案例外，大多数议会辩论都没有被威斯敏斯特以外的人注意到。这是不幸的，因为议会演讲是民选政客的核心民主责任，而辩论为议员提供了仔细审查政府政策、表达选民关切和利益的机会。近年来，政治学家在分析议会辩论方面取得了很大进展，他们致力于利用演讲来揭示议员潜在的意识形态偏好，或估计议员在不同政策问题上的优先事项。然而，尽管政治辩论的这些特点很重要，但当政客们发言时，他们通常不仅仅是在意识形态光谱上表达自己的立场，或者增加对某个特定话题的话语量。相反，政客们使用演讲的目的很广泛：影响辩论过程，回答问题，说服听众特定的观点，等等。这个项目超越了现有的研究，开发了从政治家的演讲中提取意义的新方法。为此，我将设计新的统计方法来理解政治演讲的三个不同特征。特别是，我将开发方法来衡量：1)部长们对后座议员向他们提出的问题的反应如何；2)哪些政客在议会辩论中有影响力；3)议员们如何使用修辞让他们的演讲更有说服力。我将把这些新方法应用于从1945年克莱门特·艾德礼政府开始到2015年立法会期结束的所有议会辩论。对这一庞大的政治演讲集应用新的措施，将增加我们对议员们审议政策的方式的理解，从而为英国的立法程序提供新的见解。随着时间的推移，部长们对立法机构的问责性是否变得越来越低？不同的议员在不同的政策领域有影响力吗？近年来，议会的修辞风格发生了变化吗？这些都是这个项目试图回答的问题。更广泛地说，网上数字化政治文本的爆炸式增长为我们提供了一个极好的机会，让我们更好地了解我们的民主代表如何驾驭决策过程。该项目开发的方法将有助于扩大研究领域，为利用这些新的数据来源提供工具，目的是改善我们对政治行为者行为的了解。公众和记者对议员在议会中的行为和互动有着强烈的兴趣。正如TheyWorkForYou.com和PublicWhip.org.uk等热门网站所证明的那样，议员行为的数据资源和统计摘要在公众监督政治人物方面发挥着关键作用。该项目将提高参与政治的个人了解议会成员的立法行为的能力。通过这样做，它还将为政客们说些什么，以及他们说这些话背后的动机提供新的见解。

Discussion and debate lie at the heart of democratic politics. When asked to think about politics in the UK, many people would recall images of the Prime Minister standing at the dispatch box, clashing with the Leader of the Opposition over topical issues. Similarly, many key events in the political calendar - the Budget, the Queen's Speech - revolve around large, high-profile debates on the floor of the Commons. However, aside from these limited cases, most parliamentary debates pass unnoticed by those outside of Westminster. This is unfortunate, as parliamentary speechmaking is a central democratic responsibility of elected politicians, and debates provide MPs with the opportunity to scrutinise government policy, and to voice the concerns and interests of their constituents.Political scientists have made a great deal of progress in analysing parliamentary debate in recent years, with significant attention devoted to using speeches to uncover underlying ideological preferences of MPs, or estimating the priorities that MPs place on different policy issues. However, while these features of political debate are important, when politicians speak, they are usually doing more than expressing their position on an ideological spectrum, or adding to the volume of words uttered on a given topic. Rather, politicians use speeches for a wide range of purposes: to influence the course of debate, to provide responses to questions, to persuade their audience of particular view point, and so on. This project moves beyond existing research by developing new ways to extract meaning from the speeches made by politicians. To do so, I will design new statistical methodologies for understanding three different features of political speech. In particular, I will develop methods to measure: 1) how responsive ministers are to questions put to them from backbench MPs,2) which politicians are influential in parliamentary debates, and 3) how MPs use rhetoric to make their speeches more persuasive.I will apply these new methods to the full collection of parliamentary debates from the beginning of Clement Attlee's government in 1945, to the end of the 2015 legislative session. Applying new measures to this large collection of political speeches will add depth to our understanding of the ways in which MPs deliberate over policy, and thus will provide new insights into the legislative process in the UK. Have ministers become less accountable to the legislature over time? Are different MPs influential in different policy areas? Has the style of parliamentary rhetoric changed in recent years? These are the questions that this project seeks to answer.More generally, the explosion of digitised political text online provides an excellent opportunity for us to better understand the ways in which our democratic representatives navigate the policymaking process. The methodologies developed in this project will contribute to a growing area of research that provides tools to capitalise on these new sources of data, with the aim of improving our knowledge of the behaviour of political actors. There is a strong appetite amongst the public and journalists for information about how MPs act and interact in parliament. As evidenced by popular websites like TheyWorkForYou.com and PublicWhip.org.uk, data resources and statistical summaries of MPs' behaviour play a key role in public oversight of political figures. This project will increase the ability of politically-engaged individuals to understand the legislative behaviour of members of parliament. In doing so, it will also provide new insights about what politicians say, and the motivations behind why they are saying it.