Media Visibility and Information-Seeking: Analyzing the Impact of News Coverage on Wikipedia Pageviews of Estonian MPs (2015–2023)

This study analyses how information provided by different types of interest groups influences the ability of members of parliament (MPs) to accurately perceive the preferences of those citizens who voted them into office. To study how information provision by interest groups affects MPs’ perceptions, we combine unique data from a citizen survey and face-to-face meetings with 151 federal MPs in Switzerland, thus enabling a comparison of actual voter preferences with MPs’ estimations of these preferences. Ties to citizen groups, as self-reported by MPs in our survey, relate to more accurate perceptions by MPs, even when controlling for MPs’ partisan affiliation. Ties to business groups, as declared in the official registry, relate to less accurate perceptions. These findings suggest that interest groups can both tighten and weaken MPs’ link to their party voters, which might have repercussions on substantive representation and democratic accountability.

A large strand of scholarly inquiry has built on the assumption that being active in legislatures helps further representatives’ career prospects by enhancing their media and public visibility. Previous studies suggest some visibility‐boosting effects of parliamentary work, but results vary considerably across political settings and research designs. Moreover, there is little research on the extent to which the visibility‐boosting effect of being active in parliament varies across representatives. Specifically, do legislators with high news value benefit more from legislative speechmaking, or can other representatives make up for lower news value by taking the parliamentary floor? We believe that this lack of focus on the conditional nature of the link between political work and media visibility restricts our understanding of the consequences of political work. This study therefore presents a unique combination of data covering nearly 600,000 news appearances and 850,000 parliamentary speeches of members of parliament (MPs) in the United Kingdom (2000–2015) and Norway (2000–2016) to examine the link between legislative speechmaking and the news visibility of legislators. Our results suggest that the media appearances of representatives in the United Kingdom and Norway are associated positively with the number of legislative speeches representatives make and that this positive association between speechmaking and media visibility is differential across groups of representatives, with senior MPs and government party MPs benefiting more from being active on the parliamentary floor.

The paper explores how members of parliament (MPs) address gender-related aspects in the budgeting process at the central level in Germany, a country that pursues gender equality as a global objective but has not implemented gender budgeting (GB) (yet). Nevertheless, from a budgeting perspective the German context is interesting, as parliament has unrestricted powers to amend the budget draft. The study follows approaches in performance management literature streams that have explored different types of performance information use. Building on a qualitative analysis of parliamentary budget debates, our results show that gender-related aspects matter in budgeting even when GB is not implemented. However, resources are less often referenced than programmes and policies in the budget debates. We find that MPs address gender-related aspects in a differentiated way (reflected in four types of performance information use), and that this is affected by user characteristics: the MPs’ gender, their party affiliation, committee membership and in some aspects, their age. While it may not come as a surprise that female MPs act as advocates for gender-related aspects, it is interesting that female MPs are more likely to reference resources when addressing gender-related aspects than male MPs. Further, our analysis of types of performance information use shows that a party's position as either a part of a governing coalition or opposition, as well as party lines across the opposition, affect the way in which gender-related aspects are addressed: exerting supportive use types (i.e., legitimizing, highlighting) and rather challenging use types (i.e., de-legitimizing, deflecting). Points for practitioners Even in a context where gender budgeting is not implemented, members of parliament (MPs) reference gender equality in budget debates. The frequency and the way in which gender-related aspects are referenced mirrors MPs’ stance towards gender equality (rather supportive/rather challenging). Female MPs are more likely than male MPs to draw attention to the allocation of resources for gender-related issues. More female MPs in parliament may strengthen advocacy for gender-related aspects, particularly if budget documents do not contain gender-related performance goals.

Members of parliament (MPs) and parties enjoy mutually beneficial cooperation in a legislature. Nonetheless, representatives often face cross-pressure from more than one principal, which may result in a voting dissent. Since the voting dissent of MPs in the Czech Republic has been scrutinised only on the party level, I present the very first study dealing with individual aspects of voting rebellion. The pioneering results show that between 1993 and 2017 MPs voted against a parliamentary party group (PPG) chairman more often than against the majority of PPG colleagues. The frequency of voting dissent remained the same, on average, during legislative terms regardless of an approaching election. Next, the analyses show that being a male MP, enjoying more parliamentary experience, and holding a ministerial mandate are factors that increase the chances of individual voting dissent. Conversely, voting dissent decreases for MPs from a ruling party, and for PPG (vice-)chairmen. The results imply that voting rebels attend fewer roll calls and abstain more compared to other MPs. As MPs vote against the majority of their party counterparts, they elucidate such a contradiction at plenary sessions. Overall, MPs adjust their parliamentary behaviour more if they vote against the majority of party colleagues than against a PPG chairman.

Establishment of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) in 2000 resulted in increased funding for health research in Canada. Since 2001, the number of proposals submitted to CIHR that, following peer review, are judged to be of scientific merit to warrant funding, has grown by 77%. But many of these proposals do not receive funding because of budget constraints. Given the role of Members of Parliament in setting government funding priorities, we surveyed Members of Parliament about their knowledge of and attitudes toward health research, health research funding and CIHR. All Members of Parliament were invited to participate, or to designate a senior aide to participate, in a 15-minute survey of knowledge of and attitudes toward health research, health research funding and CIHR. Interviews were conducted between July 15, 2006, and Dec. 20, 2006. Responses were analyzed by party affiliation, region and years of service as a Member of Parliament. A total of 101 of 308 Members of Parliament or their designated senior aides participated in the survey. Almost one-third of respondents were senior aides. Most of the respondents (84%) were aware of CIHR, but 32% knew nothing about its role. Participants believed that health research is a critical component of a strong health care system and that it is underfunded. Overall, 78% felt that the percentage of total government spending directed to health research funding was too low; 85% felt the same way about the percentage of government health care spending directed to health research. Fifty-four percent believed that the federal government should provide both funding and guidelines for health research, and 66% believed that the business sector should be the primary source of health research funding. Participants (57%) most frequently defined health research as study into cures or treatments of disease, and 22% of participants were aware that CIHR is the main federal government funding organization for health research. Participants perceived health research to be a low priority for Canadian voters (mean ranking 3.8/10, with 1 being unimportant and 10 being extremely important [SD 1.85]). Our results highlight significant knowledge gaps among Members of Parliament regarding health research. Many of these knowledge gaps will need to be addressed if health research is to become a priority.

Inter-personal affiliations and coalitions are an important part of politicians’ behaviour, but are often difficult to observe. Since an increasing amount of political communication now occurs online, data from online interactions may offer a new toolkit to study ties between politicians; however, the methods by which robust insights can be derived from online data require further development, especially around the dynamics of political social networks. We develop a novel method for tracking the evolution of community structures, referred to as ‘multiplex community affiliation clustering’ (MCAC), and use it to study the online social networks of Members of Parliament (MPs) and Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the United Kingdom. Social interaction networks are derived from social media (Twitter) communication over an eventful 17-month period spanning the UK General Election in 2015 and the UK Referendum on membership of the European Union in 2016. We find that the social network structure linking MPs and MEPs evolves over time, with distinct communities forming and re-forming, driven by party affiliations and political events. Without including any information about time in our model, we nevertheless find that the evolving social network structure shows multiple persistent and recurring states of affiliation between politicians, which align with content states derived from topic analysis of tweet text. These findings show that the dominant state of partisan segregation can be challenged by major political events, ideology, and intra-party tension that transcend party affiliations.

Online presence is becoming unavoidable for politicians worldwide. In countries such as the UK, Twitter has become the platform of choice, with over 85% (553 of 650) of the Members of Parliament (MPs) having an active online presence. Whereas this has allowed ordinary citizens unprecedented and immediate access to their elected representatives, it has also led to serious concerns about online hate towards MPs. This work attempts to shed light on the problem using a dataset of conversations between MPs and non-MPs over a two month period. Deviating from other approaches in the literature, our data captures entire threads of conversations between Twitter handles of MPs and citizens in order to provide a full context for content that may be flagged as 'hate'. By combining widely-used hate speech detection tools trained on several widely available datasets, we analyse 2.5 million tweets to identify hate speech against MPs and we characterise hate across multiple dimensions of time, topics and MPs' demographics. We find that MPs are subject to intense 'pile on' hate by citizens whereby they get more hate when they are already busy with a high volume of mentions regarding some event or situation. We also show that hate is more dense with regard to certain topics and that MPs who have an ethnic minority background and those holding positions in Government receive more hate than other MPs. We find evidence of citizens expressing negative sentiments while engaging in cross-party conversations, with supporters of one party (e.g. Labour) directing hate against MPs of another party (e.g. Conservative).

Wikipedia is a major source of information providing a large variety of content online, trusted by readers from around the world. Readers go to Wikipedia to get reliable information about different subjects, one of the most popular being living people, and especially politicians. While a lot is known about the general usage and information consumption on Wikipedia, less is known about the life-cycle and quality of Wikipedia articles in the context of politics. The aim of this study is to quantify and qualify content production and consumption for articles about politicians, with a specific focus on UK Members of Parliament (MPs). First, we analyze spatio-temporal patterns of readers' and editors' engagement with MPs' Wikipedia pages, finding huge peaks of attention during election times, related to signs of engagement on other social media (e.g. Twitter). Second, we quantify editors' polarisation and find that most editors specialize in a specific party and choose specific news outlets as references. Finally we observe that the average citation quality is pretty high, with statements on 'Early life and career' missing citations most often (18%).

This article explores the different uses of forms of direct verbal quotes (whole clauses, word groups, or single words/phrases) in follow-up utterances delivered during the parliamentary debates after the inaugural speech of a new chancellor in the Austrian parliament and investigates their positioning effects for members of parliament (MPs) who have the first opportunity of publicly ‘doing being a government or opposition MP’ in the new legislative term. Representing the first public confrontation between government and opposition MPs, the debates foreshadow topical and interpersonal aspects of the political frontstage communication in the beginning legislative term. The main purpose of this article is to investigate the relations between formal properties of direct verbal quotes, recontextualization practices, their pragmatic function, and the specific aspect of the public personae speakers foreground by their use in the inaugural debates. Although direct quotations in follow-up utterances of MPs do not occur very often, the analyses demonstrate that this specific form of discourse representation deserves attention not only because it is mainly opposition MPs who use direct quotations in uptaking discourse units, but also because of the different semiotic aspects of direct quotes (symbolic, content oriented vs indexical, reported speaker typifying) which are foregrounded in the investigated recontextualization practices. These practices result in MPs’ different public self-positionings toward their role of ‘being an opposition MP’, namely, either as policy-oriented arguers or as ironic evaluators.

Anti-defection laws are laws by which members of parliaments (MPs) who changed their party affiliation or voted against the position of their political faction or independent MPs who joined a political party are forced to vacate their parliamentary seat or prohibited from nomination as candidates of another political party in the next election. The essence of anti-defection laws is restricting political party members’ freedom to change their party affiliation to prevent government parties’ loss of majority in the parliament. Anti-defection laws are not uniformly used. While many established democracies see parliamentary defection as manifestation of democracy, other jurisdictions with undeveloped democracies have outlawed defection. In Ethiopia, the FDRE Constitution entitles MPs to be led by the Constitution itself, peoples’ will and their conscience, not necessarily by their party line. Accordingly, MPs can opine and vote contrary to the views of the political party of their membership in parliamentary debates; they can even change their party affiliation without risk of losing their parliamentary mandate. This makes Ethiopia one of the countries without anti-defection laws.

This article presents the research questions, research methodology, and some of the major results of a comparative, survey-based study of the use of ICT by members of parliament in seven European countries. The overall research question is whether IC

The provision of reserved seats for scheduled castes and tribes (SC/ST) in legislative bodies has been celebrated as one of the most empowering measures for them to overcome historical disadvantage. However, historical trajectory of reserved seats for SCs/STs suggests that key players like Ambedkar preferred separate electorate, multi-member constituencies and double vote as measures of effective representation for SCs over simply reserved seats with the joint electorate. It was out of political compromise in the face of Gandhi’s fast unto death that Ambedkar accepted reserved seats with a double vote from which double vote was taken out later. As per the general assumption, the presence of SCs representatives in decision-making bodies makes the voices of their community better heard. This study attempts to empirically know the ‘representativeness’ of SC/ST members of legislative bodies as far as substantiveness of their representation is concerned by comparatively analysing parliamentary questions raised by them and non-SC Members of Parliament (MPs) on the issues concerning SCs. Our analysis confirms a positive relationship between reserved seats and number of questions asked on SC/ST interests by the reserved seat MPs. However, several other factors like party affiliation, membership in ruling or opposition party and ideology appear to affect SC/ST MPs’ ability to represent their community.

Wikipedia is an open-source online encyclopedia and one of the most-read sources of online health information. Likewise, Wikipedia page views have also been analyzed to inform public health services and policies. The present review analyzed 29 studies utilizing Wikipedia page views for health research. Most reviewed studies were published in recent years and emanated from high-income countries. Together with Wikipedia page views, most studies also used data from other internet sources, such as Google, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit. The reviewed studies also explored various non-communicable diseases, infectious diseases, and health interventions to describe changes in the utilization of online health information from Wikipedia, to examine the effect of public events on public interest and information usage about health-related Wikipedia pages, to estimate and predict the incidence and prevalence of diseases, to predict data from other internet data sources, to evaluate the effectiveness of health education activities, and to explore the evolution of a health topic. Given some of the limitations in replicating some of the reviewed studies, future research can specify the specific Wikipedia page or pages analyzed, the language of the Wikipedia pages examined, dates of data collection, dates explored, type of data, and whether page views were limited to Internet users and whether web crawlers and redirects to the Wikipedia page were included. Future research can also explore public interest in other commonly read health topics available in Wikipedia, develop Wikipedia-based models that can be used to predict disease incidence and improve Wikipedia-based health education activities.

This study provides an analysis of the positioning of Ålandic political leadership vis-à-vis the demands of representation in the European Union (EU) and the corresponding reactions of the Swedish People's Party (SFP) during the referendums on EU membership. By analyzing news articles from 1994, this study shows that the SFP had already sought to establish for itself a mediating role between Ålandic expectations and the political realities on the Finnish mainland during the period leading up to membership in the EU. Founded in 1906, the SFP has traditionally branded itself as the flag bearer of Swedish interests in Finland. On face value, one would assume a lot of common political ground between the Ålandic political context and the Finland Swedish efforts to maintain equal status for Swedish as a national language in an overwhelmingly Finnish-speaking country. However, relations between the SFP and Åland have not always been smooth. Most notably, the party refused to support the Åland Movement's attempts to join Sweden between 1917 and 1921 and was firmly positioned with the other Finnish parties in supporting the claims of the Finnish state during the Åland question. While the rupture between Åland and the SFP never truly healed, they have been able to reestablish new forms of cooperation over the years. All members of parliament (MPs) elected from Åland have sat with the SFP MPs in the Swedish Parliamentary Group. Additionally, Members of the European Parliament (MEP) from the SFP that have been elected since 1995 have consistently hired political assistants from Åland and unlike the other Finnish parties, have been committed to the idea that Åland should get an MEP for itself. This study summarizes the historical modes of cooperation between the SFP and Åland, with particular focus on the SFP's positioning regarding Ålandic demands of representation during the EU membership referendum process. This article shows that EU membership has created a new forum for conflict and cooperation between Åland and the SFP through the struggle for representation in the EU organs, namely the European Parliament. This crucial historical period is analyzed through the lens of “sovereignty games,” which allows for an analysis of the paradiplomacy of an autonomous region within a nation state through a national minority party. As a result, this study highlights the need for a differentiated account of the political interdependence of the SFP and Åland and the importance of avoiding interpreting one side's perspective from the standpoint of the other.

Child health outcomes vary between Parliamentary Constituencies (PCs) in India. There are a total of 543 PCs in India, each of which is a geographical unit represented by a Member of Parliament (MP). MP characteristics, such as age, gender, education, the number of terms they have served, and whether they belong to a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe, might be associated with indicators of child malnutrition and child mortality. The purpose of this paper was to examine the associations between MP characteristics and measures of child malnutrition and mortality. We did not find any meaningful associations between MP characteristics and child anthropometry, anemia, and mortality. Future research should consider the size of a constituency served by an MP along with MP party affiliations as these factors might help explain between-PC variations in child health outcomes. Our findings also underscore the need to better support female MPs and MPs from marginalized caste and tribal groups.