Legislative Speeches Research Articles

JST and rJST: joint estimation of sentiment and topics in textual data using a semi-supervised approach

ABSTRACT This paper demonstrates the performance of the Joint Sentiment Topic model (JST) and the reversed Joint Sentiment Topic model (rJST) in measuring sentiment in political speeches, comparing them against a set of popular methods for sentiment analysis: widely used off-the-shelf sentiment dictionaries; an embeddings-enhanced dictionary approach; Latent Semantic Scaling, a semi-supervised approach; and a zero-shot transformer-based approach using a large language model (GPT-4). The findings reveal JST’s superiority over all non-transformer-based approaches in predicting human-coded sentiment in multiple languages and its ability to replicate known sentiment trends in legislative speech. rJST, meanwhile, provides valuable topic-specific sentiment estimates, responsive to political dynamics and significant events. Both models are, however, outperformed by transformer-based models like GPT-4. Additionally, the paper introduces the ’sentitopics’ R-package, designed to facilitate the use of JST and rJST in computational text analysis workflows. This package is compatible with popular text analysis tools, making the models accessible for applied researchers in communication science.

Race, legislative speech, and symbolic representation in Congress

AbstractWe know little about the extent to which racial minorities are symbolically represented by members of Congress. This stands in contrast to a wealth of research analyzing the extent to which minorities are substantively and descriptively represented. This article provides the most comprehensive analysis of symbolic representation to date. Using data on legislators’ speech from 105,875 newsletters and 620,838 floor speeches, I find that White legislators of both parties are more likely to symbolically represent Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians if those groups are more populous in their constituency. However, these effects only hold cross‐sectionally; using a difference‐in‐differences setup from redistricting shocks, I find that there is little within‐legislator variation in speech patterns as their constituencies change. Lastly, I show that, unlike on the symbolic dimension, legislators’ substantive representation is not influenced by group size. I conclude that White legislators are symbolically responsive to their constituents’ identities in their speech patterns.

COVID success? For whom? Examining the political representation of migrants in Taiwan

ABSTRACT Taiwan’s handling of COVID-19 has been seen as a success. Nevertheless, little is known about how the government has considered migrants in its COVID-19 policies. Using a corpus analysis of the legislative speeches of the Taiwanese policymakers between 2020 and 2022, we investigate how migrants are represented in Taiwan’s COVID-19 strategy. Our findings show that policymakers inadequately consider migrants when drawing up emergency measures and restrictions, despite making up of 6.3 per cent of the population. Our findings illustrate that policymakers focus more on migrant workers than migrant spouses and that policymakers demonize migrant workers and victimize migrant spouses. As COVID-19 does not differentiate based on nationality and constituents would want migrants to be represented for their own safety, the study demonstrates how policymakers may accommodate a diverse population beyond their constituents in crises and illuminates ways to create an inclusive society where non-citizens’ health and safety are considered.

What Explains Interest Group Prominence in Parliamentary Speech? Policy Agenda, Partisanship, or Conflict Expansion

Gaining the attention of legislators in a crowded advocacy landscape is a key dilemma for organized interests. Yet, there has not been a great deal of direct analysis of whether groups are indeed recognized as important by politicians in the context of them advancing political arguments. In this article, we examine under what conditions interest groups achieve prominence among political elites. Drawing on a supervised machine learning approach to code prominence from legislative speech, we exploit variations in levels of prominence for the entire Australian interest groups system. We find that prominence is highly concentrated and that it covaries with the need to align with prevailing policy agendas and the logic of conflict expansion. Conversely, we do not find evidence of a strong partisan or ideological dimension of prominence. This contributes to our understanding of the responsiveness and representativeness of democratic political systems in which the interest group sector is expected to funnel public preferences into policymaking.

Intra-party determinants of the allocation of legislative speeches

ABSTRACT Parliamentary speech is an important and highly visible feature of legislatures in democracies. Time in parliament is scarce and the allocation of floor time is characterised by largely incompatible preferences between party leaders, aiming to preserve a unified party label, and individual members of parliament (MPs), facing incentives to differentiate themselves and take alternative stances to maximise their personal reelection prospects. This paper investigates the role of MP policy positions in the allocation of parliamentary speeches in different institutional settings. Measuring positions using a novel dataset containing tweets by MPs in three European countries, we find that MPs with positions diverging from the party line get allocated less time on the parliamentary floor when floor time is exclusively controlled by parties, but not when parliamentary rules allow individual access to the floor.

No Such Thing as Free Speech? Performativity, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in the UK

AbstractThe relationship between academic freedom and freedom of speech features prominently in public and political discussions concerning the role of universities in Western liberal democracies. Recently, these debates have attracted increased attention, owing in part to media framing of a ‘free speech crisis’, especially in UK and US universities. One type of response is to regulate academic expression through legislation, such as the UK’s 2023 Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. This article offers a critical analysis of the assumptions concerning the performativity of speech in this kind of legal intervention. It extends Judith Butler’s discussion of the concept of ‘harmful speech’ as reported by Butler (Excitable speech: a politics of the performative, Routledge Classics, London, 1997) to conceptualize speech-acts as performative not only when it comes to populations, but also when it comes to institutions. Reconceptualizing universities as producing as well as being constituted by speech-acts, the article argues that the effects of free speech legislation need to be considered in the context of the transformation of universities and other political actors (including governments and student unions) in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. It argues that legal enforcement of free speech at universities further obscures the distinction between negative and positive liberties identified by Isaiah Berlin (Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1958), and considers this shift as part of the reconfiguration of political ontology in late modernity.

Gender, Institutions, and Legislative Speech

Gender, Institutions, and Legislative Speech

Who polarizes parliament? Partisan hostility in Norwegian legislative debates

In many democratic societies, research has identified an increase in animosity between supporters of different political parties. While this phenomenon has been extensively examined among the general public, less research has explored the role of political elites in contributing to partisan hostility. This study aims to fill this research gap by analyzing instances where members of parliament (MPs) express negative sentiments toward representatives of opposing parties in legislative speeches. Specifically, we investigate which MPs within parties are driving elite rhetorical polarization. We hypothesize that MPs with less experience in parliament and less experience outside of party politics are more likely to contribute to polarizing speech due to stronger partisan identities. Analyzing Norwegian MPs’ speeches between 1998 and 2016, we find support for these hypotheses. Our findings highlight intra-party differences in polarization and contribute new insights into the characteristics that shape polarizing rhetoric among political elites.

Donor activity is associated with US legislators' attention to political issues.

Campaign contributions are a staple of congressional life. Yet, the search for tangible effects of congressional donations often focuses on the association between contributions and votes on congressional bills. We present an alternative approach by considering the relationship between money and legislators' speech. Floor speeches are an important component of congressional behavior, and reflect a legislator's policy priorities and positions in a way that voting cannot. Our research provides the first comprehensive analysis of the association between a legislator's campaign donors and the policy issues they prioritize with congressional speech. Ultimately, we find a robust relationship between donors and speech, indicating a more pervasive role of money in politics than previously assumed. We use a machine learning framework on a new dataset that brings together legislator metadata for all representatives in the US House between 1995 and 2018, including committee assignments, legislative speech, donation records, and information about Political Action Committees. We compare information about donations against other potential explanatory variables, such as party affiliation, home state, and committee assignments, and find that donors consistently have the strongest association with legislators' issue-attention. We further contribute a procedure for identifying speech and donation events that occur in close proximity to one another and share meaningful connections, identifying the proverbial needles in the haystack of speech and donation activity in Congress which may be cases of interest for investigative journalism. Taken together, our framework, data, and findings can help increase the transparency of the role of money in politics.

The Constructive Role of the Media in Hate Speech Controversies: The Valtònyc and Hasél Cases

ABSTRACT Social networks such as Twitter can promote social alarm about conflicts concerning anti-hate speech legislation. The protests after the prison sentences of the rappers Valtònyc (2018) and Hasél (2021) are two paradigmatic cases in Spain. This research analyses how citizens’ desire to combat hate speech may be frustrated when the law is applied. Using a quantitative and qualitative methodology, we observe the users and the media reactions on Twitter in both cases. In the first phase, we conducted a content analysis (n = 694) to identify the position of users and the media. In a second phase, discourse analysis examined the presence or absence of the features of constructive journalism in the news coverage. The results show that the anti-law stance is predominant in Twitter messages, but there are few references to freedom of expression and censorship. While there is a considerable presence of an angry style of communication and polarised messages in users’ tweets, the media adopt a rational and informative approach. The media discourse in both cases is still far from the traits of constructive journalism. Therefore, this research shows that informative actions based on the principles of constructive journalism could mediate between citizen sensibility and legislation. This could promote a sense of citizenship that avoids hate speech.

Estimating Parties’ Policy Positions in Uruguay: Comparing Scaling Methods Based on Legislative Speeches and Roll-Call Votes

ABSTRACTThis research note takes advantage of a novel dataset to analyze legislators’ behavior in Uruguay’s Parliament. Comparing the positions of legislators based on floor speeches and roll-call voting, it discusses the relationship between discourse and voting among individual legislators and parties. The dataset contains more than 57,000 speeches from more than 1,000 Uruguayan legislators between 1985 and 2015 and its related R package. The study estimates the parties’ policy positions on the basis of two data sources, roll-call votes and floor speeches, and then compares both results. Contrary to expectations, no clear association appears between the two scaling methods, demonstrating that vote and legislative speech may reflect the behavior of individual legislators with potentially conflicting goals. Strategic calculations or party discipline may be plausible explanations for the divergent results obtained from text and roll-call scaling methods.

The determinants of the media coverage of politicians: The role of parliamentary activities

AbstractA 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.

Congressional Committees, Electoral Connections, and Legislative Speech

This article examines the effects of committee specialization and district characteristics on speech participation by topic and congressional forum. It argues that committee specialization should increase speech participation during legislative debates, while district characteristics should affect the likelihood of speech participation in non-lawmaking forums. To examine these expectations, we analyze over 100,000 speeches delivered in the Chilean Chamber of Deputies between 1990 and 2018. To carry out our topic classification task, we utilize the recently developed state-of-the-art multilingual Transformer model XLM-RoBERTa. Consistent with informational theories, we find that committee specialization is a significant predictor of speech participation in legislative debates. In addition, consistent with theories purporting that legislative speech serves as a vehicle for the electoral connection, we find that district characteristics have a significant effect on speech participation in non-lawmaking forums.

Universities and other Institutions – not Hate Speech Laws – are a threat to Freedom of Political Speech

One of the strongest arguments against hate speech legislation is the so-called Argument from Political Speech. This argument problematizes the restrictions that might be placed on political opinions or political critique when these opinions are expressed in a way which can be interpreted as ‘hateful’ towards minority groups. One of the strongest free speech scholars opposing hate speech legislation is Ronald Dworkin, who stresses that having restrictions on hate speech is, in fact, illegitimate in a liberal democracy. The right to express oneself freely concerning any political decision is, according to Dworkin, a core democratic principle; it is what self-governance – and hence liberal democracies – are built upon. Dworkin and many other free speech scholars based in the United States see hate speech legislation as a threat to expressing oneself freely and critically. I argue that Dworkin and other US-based free speech scholars tend to overlook actual hate speech legislation in countries where such laws have been implemented and have functioned for decades. Furthermore, I argue that the real threat against political speech lies not in hate speech legislation but rather outside of the law, namely, in private institutions such as universities and museums. Restrictions on political speech in various societal circumstances have been on the rise over the last decades – first and foremost in the US. I analyse why these restrictions on political speech are more widespread in the only Western country without laws against hate speech than they are in countries with implemented hate speech laws. Keywords: political speech, hate speech, hate speech legislation, private institu-tions, universities, USA

The Politics of Interruptions: Gendered Disruptions of Legislative Speeches

Floor time in legislatures is a valuable commodity that legislators use to gain political capital and electoral benefits. There are well-known political and institutional barriers to participation, but these do not explain gender differences in access to floor time. In this article, we look at the role interruptions play as potential barriers to floor time. We explore how women strategically react to these barriers and consider how these reactions ultimately lead to gendered differences in legislative participation. Our findings show that differences in participation across genders are a consequence of rational strategies followed by women who sacrifice floor time in the short term to avoid the long-term consequences of challenging gendered barriers, such as interruptions. We test our argument using original data on legislative speeches from the Ecuadorian Congress between 1988 and 2018.

Hate Speech and the Freedom Discourse

Hate speech accompanies intellectual freedom in new media. In the context of Indonesia, this phenomenon is very important during a political event such as legislative elections, presidential election, or elections of regional head. Since the 2014 presidential election, the term 'haters' was widely known, titled people with golden messages hateful to certain people or groups. Especially for netizens (youth users) - the Y and Z generation, the practice of communication with these hate messages should receive special attention. In addition to the heir of the nation, this is what coloring cyberspace now. They are native to the digital world (digital native). They are aware of the right to speak and express but understand that the online realm is the public domain inherent in normative responsibility. This paper reviews efforts to send hate messages through hate speech legislation (Hate Speech) laws and how ITE laws against hate speech acts.

A Dynamic Measure of Bureaucratic Reputation: New Data for New Theory

AbstractBureaucratic reputation is one of the most important concepts used to understand the behavior of administrative agencies and their interactions with multiple audiences. Despite a rich theoretical literature discussing reputation, we do not have a comparable measure across agencies, between countries, and over time. I present a new strategy to measure bureaucratic reputation from legislative speeches with word‐embedding techniques. I introduce an original dataset on the reputation of 465 bureaucratic bodies over a period of 40 years, and across two countries—the U.S. and the U.K. I perform several validation tests and present an application of this method to investigate whether partisanship and agency politicization matter for reputation. I find that agencies enjoy a better reputation among the members of the party in government, with partisan differences less pronounced for independent bodies. Finally, I discuss how this measurement strategy can contribute to classical and new questions about political–administrative interactions.

Партия власти и системная оппозиция в Государственной Думе: различия в структуре территориального образа России

Abstract. Introduction: the legislative speeches at plenary sessions in the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation provide rich material for analyzing deputy’s ideas about the world arrangement, including the issues of territorial and political nature. The latter are of interest because they are a kind of gateway to the “real world” in which real people and organizations live and operate in specific localities and territories. It can be assumed that with regard to the parties represented in the State Duma, their place in the partypolitical system is one of the factors of differences in Russia’s territorial image. The period under analysis covers the time between the State Duma’s 4th and 7th convocation (2003–2021), characterized by the formation of a fairly stable party-political system with the dominance of “United Russia” party and the representation of three parties of systemic opposition in the lower house of the Russian parliament. Objectives: to identify the differences between the factions of the State Duma in the volume and structure of references to geographical objects. Methods: “Natasha” library tools for analyzing natural language text based on deep learning methods, the OpenStreetMap automatic geocoding system, and content analysis. Results: compared to other factions, “United Russia” refers less to geographical entities in relation to the total speaking volume of its deputies. At the same time, the mention of Russia and everything “geographically” connected with it has a more abstract, that is, high-level character among “United Russia” members. This is manifested, at least, in two ways. Firstly, “United Russia” deputies talk less about geographic objects of the regional level and below. Secondly, in their general reference to specific regions, they are much more likely, compared to other factions’ deputies, to limit themselves by only naming the region. In other words, systemic opposition deputies talk more about towns and localities “within” regions. Conclusions: The territorial image of the country in the “United Russia” rhetoric significantly differs from the other factions’ image in the level of its abstraction. This may be explained by the role of “United Russia” as the party of power, i.e. the instrument of presidential dominance in parliament. Being politically dominant, it bears the main administrative burden in the Duma processes. This reduces its incentive for using the rhetoric that opens up the gateways to the “real world”.

Hate Speech Legislation and Freedom of Expression: Finding the Balance

Hate Speech Legislation and Freedom of Expression: Finding the Balance

Hateful and Other Negative Communication in Online Commenting Environments: Content, Structure and Targets

Information and communication technologies are increasingly interacting with modern societies. One specific manifestation of this interaction concerns hateful and other negative comments in online environments. Various terms appear to denote this communication, from flaming, indecency and intolerance to hate speech. However, there is still a lack of an umbrella term that broadly captures this communication. Therefore, this paper introduces the concept of socially unacceptable discourse, which serves as the basis for an empirical study that evaluated online comments scraped from the Facebook pages of the three most-visited Slovenian news outlets. Machine-learning algorithms were used to narrow the focus to topics related to refugees and LGBT rights. Ten thousand comments were manually coded to identify and structure socially undesirable discourse. The results show that about half of all comments belonged to this type of discourse, with a surprisingly stable level and structure across media (i.e., right-wing versus mainstream) and topics. Most of these comments could also be considered a potential violation of hate speech legislation. In the context of these findings, the political and ideological consequences and implications of mediatised emotions are discussed.