UK House Of Commons Research Articles

Measuring Polarization with Text Analysis: Evidence from the UK House of Commons, 1811–2015

Political scientists can rely on a long tradition of applying unsupervised measurement models to estimate ideology and preferences from texts. However, in practice the hope that the dominant source of variation in their data is the quantity of interest is often not realized. In this paper, I argue that in the messy world of speeches we have to rely on supervised approaches that include information on party affiliation in order to produce meaningful estimates of polarization. To substantiate this argument, I introduce a validation framework that may be used to comparatively assess supervised and unsupervised methods, and estimate polarization on the basis of 6.2 million records of parliamentary speeches from the UK House of Commons over the period 1811–2015. Beyond introducing several important adjustments to existing estimation approaches, the paper’s methodological contribution therefore consists of outlining the challenges of applying unsupervised estimation techniques to speech data, and arguing in detail why we should instead rely on supervised methods to measure polarization.

Explaining MPs’ communication to their constituents: Evidence from the UK House of Commons

Everyone agrees that members of parliaments (MPs) should keep in touch with the people they represent. Yet some MPs invest more in communication with their constituency than others. We approach this problem with data from the parliamentary communication allowance in the United Kingdom, where all MPs had the same amount of budget to reach out proactively to their electors. We base our analysis on two fundamental assumptions: that re-election is the main goal of legislators and that communication to signal trustworthiness is one way of securing their re-election. We then examine the impact of electoral prospects, constituency characteristics, and parliamentary behaviour on communication to constituents. We find evidence that, even in the absence of budgetary constraints, MPs’ constituency communication depends on challenges to their re-election.

The Transcription and Representation of Spoken Political Discourse in the UK House of Commons

This paper considers the representation of spoken political discourse through the transcription practices of the House of Commons. It considers how the Hansard method of transcription represents the oral debates during the weekly parliamentary sessions of Prime Minister’s questions in three areas: lexical and grammatical fidelity, performance characteristics and interruptions from the audience. The paper also considers how accurately and faithfully speakers in the House quote from Hansard during these sessions as they pursue their arguments. The findings suggest that while Hansard does what it purports to do, modern transcription methods and digital representations necessitate additional tools to augment this system. We argue the case for a more representational, multi-tool approach to the transcription of discourse.

Integrating the view of the public into the formal legislative process: public reading stage in the UK House of Commons

ABSTRACTRecent years have seen increasing calls to integrate the public's voice into the parliamentary process. This article examines the impact of public reading stage (PRS) on the UK Parliament's scrutiny of a bill. A new stage of the legislative process piloted by the House of Commons in February 2013, PRS invited the public to comment on a bill undergoing parliamentary scrutiny (the Children and Families Bill). The PRS was designed to encourage members of the public to participate in the scrutiny of legislation through a specially designed forum on parliament's website. Over 1000 comments were submitted. Drawing on a content analysis of the comments given by the public to the bill, complemented by interviews with members of parliament, key officials and PRS participants, it was found that although the public reading stage had an impressive response, it failed to make much of a tangible impact on the parliamentary scrutiny of the bill. This was largely due to the choice of bill being used for the pilot and its lack of appropriate integration into the formal legislative process.

Metaphors of parliamentary budget debates in times of crisis

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to explore the metaphoric imprint the global financial crisis has left on the discourse of parliamentary budget debates, which are at the intersection of political and economic discourse, as well as the imprint the MPs have tried to leave on the electorate by carefully selecting metaphors to hide agency, disclaim responsibility and project themselves as saviours. We focus both on conceptual and linguistic metaphors, trying, simultaneously, to account for how the metaphors are developed in the debate. The corpus comprises two budget debates held at the time the financial crisis was in full swing (conducted in the Parliament of Montenegro and the UK House of Commons). The recurrent conceptual metaphors related to the economic crisis were analysed for the two parts of the corpus respectively – the results were compared and similarities were observed in terms of the metaphors used and the discourse strategies behind their selection.

Do UK MPs engage more with Select Committees since the Wright Reforms? An Interrupted Time Series Analysis, 1979–2016

The 2010 Wright Reforms are the most significant changes to the Select Committee system in the UK House of Commons since their inauguration in their modern form in 1979. We use interrupted time series techniques (ARIMA) to test the impact of the Wright Report on the level of parliamentarians’ engagement with those Select Committees covered by the Wright Reforms using proxy measures of membership attendance and turnover rates. We find little or no evidence that the Wright Report had an impact on these outcomes. In light of these findings, we argue that some of the claims made regarding the successes of Select Committees and the Wright Reforms are overblown or, at least, premature and inadequately supported by evidence, and that further reforms may be needed if the aims of the Wright Committee are to be realised more fully.

VIENAS IŠ TRIJŲ: SEIMO PIRMININKO STATUSAS IR VAIDMUO

Šiame straipsnyje, remiantis neoinstitucionalizmo ir politinės lyderystėsteorijų nuostatomis, analizuojami parlamento pirmininko pareigybėsstatusas, vaidmuo ir reikšmė parlamento institucionalizacijos kontekste, pristatomi mokslinėje literatūroje nurodomi šios pareigybės tipai, pagrindžiamosteorinės prielaidos analizuoti Seimo Pirmininko pareigybę. Remiantisišskirtais kriterijais, analizuojami Lietuvos Respublikos Seimo Pirmininkovaidmuo ir reikšmė politikos procese, per Lietuvos nepriklausomybės istorijąsusiformavęs šios pareigybės tipas, jis lyginamas su atitinkamais Vakarųvalstybių modeliais.

Committee scrutiny in Scotland: a comparative and bi-constitutional perspective

This article addreses scrutiny undertaken through departmental committees at the Scottish Parliament. The analysis is addressed through four distinctive phases – choice, evidence-gathering, evaluation and outputs – developed through using a wide-ranging comparative literature. The findings on Scotland are discussed in terms of the bi-constitutional perspective and specifically the emergence of different forms of committee scrutiny at the Scottish Parliament and the UK House of Commons. This analysis is subsequently widened through reference to committee scrutiny at the Northern Ireland Assembly and the National Assembly for Wales. Finally, wider applications are identified.

Political Leadership in Parliament: The Role of Select Committee Chairs in the UK House of Commons

Concepts of political leadership have been applied sparingly to parliaments, and not at all to the study of House of Commons select committees in the UK Parliament, where analysis has largely focused on their institutional capacity to scrutinise government and hold it to account. Yet examining these committees through a political leadership lens illuminates the complex role of committee chairs, a role which was significantly reshaped in 2010 with a shift to election of chairs by the whole House. This article analyses select committee chairs through the lens of political leadership, and draws on a series of interviews with chairs in order to delineate the nature of the political leadership they perform. It argues that, as chairs are now increasingly important parliamentary and policy actors, our understanding of them is significantly advanced by conceptualising their role as one of parliamentary political leadership, and that this in turn enriches our analytical toolkit when it comes to the study of parliaments.

Does religion count for religious parliamentary representation? Evidence from Early Day Motions

ABSTRACTThe article addresses one facet of the representation puzzle, namely substantive minority representation in the UK House of Commons. It examines whether a religious Jewish and Muslim minority background stimulates politicians from these backgrounds to address issues of concern for Jewish and Muslim minority groups in Early Day Motions (EDMs), and compares the effects from identity-based and institutional predictors. The study draws upon previous studies that used low-cost parliamentary activities to assess the impact of gender and ethnic minority identities on the representation of women and ethnic minorities, employing quantitative content analysis and time-series cross-sectional data analysis to examine the content of EDMs sponsored by members of parliament from Jewish and Muslim background (plus a control group) between 1997 and 2012. The analyses test for the effects of religious background and institutional predictors on the likelihood of referring to minority issues. They show that identity-based predictors such as a religious background are vastly inferior to institutional factors, including a legislative role, representing a constituency with a significant proportion of minority population, and the length of parliamentary service, in determining such references.

How Do Policy Memes Spread? An Analysis of the UK House of Commons Debates

Scholars still know very little about the diffusion and evolution of policies within legislatures over time. This paper presents a first step towards a computational model that captures how policies are discussed by political actors and diffuse among them. We introduce the concept of ‘political meme’, that is, a set of tokens that refers to a specific policy issue. Drawing on research in information diffusion theory, we develop a framework to account for the diffusion policy memes. We use a novel dataset of legislative speeches from the UK House of Commons that includes every debate from 1935 to 2013. Focusing on the last five legislative sessions we extract the most frequent bigrams and trigrams in the texts, and identify a sample of policy memes. Next we then derive their cumulative frequency distributions and test whether their diffusion growth curves can be modeled as a logistic function. Our findings suggest that not all political memes follow an ‘S-shape’ curve. Indeed, very idiosyncratic memes referring to sudden events or policy issues register steep increases in attention, while others appear to be discussed at constant rates, therefore being better described by a linear function. Further research will integrate our findings with network science, investigating the structure of the network of speakers revolving around pre-defined political memes and extending our analysis to include full range of data.

Descriptive Representation and Political Trust: A Quasi-natural Experiment Utilising Ignorance

This note investigates the claim that descriptive representation can have symbolic benefits. Using data from Great Britain, it uses the opportunity provided by the ignorance of voters about their legislative institutions to examine the effect of different perceptions of the scale of group representation. It tests whether there is a relationship between estimates of the scale of women's political representation and political trust/satisfaction. It finds statistically significant but weak relationships, which become stronger once controlling for a desire to see more women present in the UK House of Commons. The scale of women's representation in the Commons appears not to matter to all women (or to men), but it matters most for those for whom women's representation is an issue. Even with this group, however, the scale of the effects is marginal.

The role of adversarial discourse in political opposition

The focus of this study is on the role played by adversarial questioning in political opposition. As an illustrative example, a detailed analysis is presented of two sessions of Prime Minister’s Questions in the UK House of Commons (6 and13 July, 2011), in which the Leader of the Opposition (Ed Miliband) challenged the Prime Minister (David Cameron) regarding his handling of the British phone-hacking scandal. The study is conceptualized in terms of theories of politeness (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987) and impoliteness (Culpeper 1996), also in terms of the concept of follow-ups (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975). It is argued that this analysis has implications for all three linguistic conceptualizations, furthermore that PMQs, despite its many detractors and deficiencies, can play an important role in sustaining political dialogue and political accountability through adversarial questioning.

Devolution and the enhancement of scrutiny: A case study of the committees of the National Assembly for Wales

This article addresses committee scrutiny undertaken at the National Assembly for Wales during the third assembly (2007–2011). The analysis is addressed through a scrutiny framework that considers the substantive issues in terms of three overarching elements – selection, access to information and assistance, and evaluation. The framework is developed through scholarship about the UK House of Commons as well as a wide range of other parliaments and assemblies. This analysis is also used to identify features facilitating effectiveness and specify seven hypotheses concerning explanations for scrutiny characteristics. The analysis is then applied to the Welsh case study, which results from a substantive series of interviews with Assembly Members, witnesses and officials, as well as significant documentary analysis.

The Constitutional Right to a Healthy Environment

Do people have a right to clean air, safe drinking water, and a healthy environment? Fifty years ago, the concept of a human right to a healthy environment was viewed as a novel, even radical, idea...

Election Cycles in MPs' outside Interests? The UK House of Commons, 2005–2010

Politicians often implement popular changes in public policies prior to elections, with the aim of improving their Election Day outcome. This research note evaluates whether such ‘electioneering’ carries over also into politicians' extra-parliamentary activities. Evidence from the UK House of Commons over the period 2005–10 suggests that adjustments do occur in MPs' outside activities over the election cycle. The safety of the politician's seat and his or her decision to stand for re-election play an important mediating role.

Debating Abortion, Deliberative Reciprocity and Parliamentary Advocacy

An influential model of deliberative democracy advances a principle of reciprocity as a norm of democratic debate on morally controversial issues. This norm is at odds with behaviour that has been observed in political campaigning and policy making where advocates of competing positions talk past one another. Does this inconsistency stem from a contrast between the normative and empirical or from not considering empirically plausible practices of democratic debate in which reciprocity might be respected? One such practice is free votes on conscience issues in the UK parliament. This article examines six second reading debates in the UK House of Commons on abortion legislation to assess whether, in favourable circumstances, political debate is consistent with reciprocity. Utilising computer-aided text analysis, via the Alceste program, it finds no gross departure from the norm of reciprocity, suitably operationalised, but neither does it find complete conformity to the norm of reciprocity. Because advocacy is an important component of political representation, deliberative norms are qualified in practice.

Parliamentary Questions as Instruments of Substantive Representation: Visible Minorities in the UK House of Commons, 2005–10

Does the growing descriptive representation of minority-ethnic legislators in the British House of Commons have any implications for the substantive representation of minority-related issues in the UK Parliament? This study is based on a data set of over 16,000 parliamentary questions tabled by 50 British backbench Members of Parliament (MPs) in the 2005–10 Parliament, including the 16 immigrant-origin MPs with a ‘visible-minority’ background. Based on a series of multivariate models, it is found that all British MPs sampled for this study – irrespective of their ethnic status – respond to electoral incentives arising from the socio-demographic composition of their constituencies: minority and non-minority MPs alike ask more questions relating to minority concerns, if they represent constituencies with a high share of non-White residents. Controlling for that general effect, however, MPs with a visible-minority status do tend to ask significantly more questions about ethnic diversity and equality issues.

Analysing Parliamentary Debate with Computer Assistance

The analysis of parliamentary debates is at the confluence of a number of developments in political science. What light can automated and semi‐automated techniques throw on such analysis? In this paper we compare two such approaches, one semi‐automated (Hamlet) and the other fully automated (Alceste). We use both approaches to identify the prominent themes in debate and to assess how far speakers who favour different positions adopt a distinct pattern of discourse. We seek to assess how far the two approaches yield convergent or divergent analyses. Selecting a second reading debate from the UK House of Commons on a private member's bill on abortion in July 1966, we are able to show similarities of analysis despite the detailed differences between the two approaches. In particular, the analysis in Hamlet al.lows identification of the extent to which individual speakers employ one type of vocabulary rather than another. Alceste is able to provide a statistical basis for the different classes of vocabulary that occur in the debate. However, the two programs rest upon quite different assumptions about the relationship between syntax and meaning, with implications for the practice of political science.

UK classification of drugs of abuse: an un-evidence-based mess

It is extremely fortuitous that the UK House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee decided to pick classification of drugs of abuse as one of its case studies into the Government's handling of scientific advice, risk, and evidence in policymaking. Their concluding report, Drug classification: making a hash of it?, 1 House of Commons Science and Technology Committee—fifth report. Drug classification: making a hash of it?. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmsctech/1031/103102.htmDate: July 31, 2006 Google Scholar has made public verbal, written, and scientific evidence in the stop, start, put on hold, and do not disclose efforts of the Government to date. The report's title hints at the Committee's opinion of the current classification system, but is not strong enough. The report highlights a situation that almost defies belief.