Databases, Factual; Government Employees/psychology; Humans; New Zealand; Models, Theoretical; Persuasive Communication; Politics; Speech; Verbal Behavior; Government Employees; Multidisciplinary; Computer Science - Computation and Language; Computer Science - Digital Libraries; cs.SI; Physics - Physics and Society
Abstract :
[en] Quantitative methods to describe the participation to debate of Members of Parliament and the parties they belong to are lacking. Here we propose a new approach that combines topic modeling with complex networks techniques, and use it to characterize the political discourse at the New Zealand Parliament. We implement a Latent Dirichlet Allocation model to discover the thematic structure of the government's digital database of parliamentary speeches, and construct from it two-mode networks linking Members of the Parliament to the topics they discuss. Our results show how topic popularity changes over time and allow us to relate the trends followed by political parties in their discourses with specific social, economic and legislative events. Moreover, the community analysis of the two-mode network projections reveals which parties dominate the political debate as well as how much they tend to specialize in a small or large number of topics. Our work demonstrates the benefits of performing quantitative analysis in a domain normally reserved for qualitative approaches, providing an efficient way to measure political activity.
Disciplines :
Physical, chemical, mathematical & earth Sciences: Multidisciplinary, general & others Political science, public administration & international relations
Author, co-author :
Curran, Ben; Te Pūnaha Matatini, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Higham, Kyle; Te Pūnaha Matatini, School of Chemical and Physical Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Ortiz, Elisenda; Te Pūnaha Matatini, School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
VASQUES FILHO, Demival ; University of Luxembourg ; Te Pūnaha Matatini, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand ; Department of Physics, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
External co-authors :
yes
Language :
English
Title :
Look who's talking: Two-mode networks as representations of a topic model of New Zealand parliamentary speeches.
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