Tracking Amendments to Legislation and Other Political Texts with a Novel Minimum-Edit-Distance Algorithm: DocuToads

Political scientists often find themselves tracking amendments to political texts. As different actors weigh in, texts change as they are drafted and redrafted, reflecting political preferences and power. This study provides a novel solution to the prob- lem of detecting amendments to political text based upon minimum edit distances. We demonstrate the usefulness of two language-insensitive, transparent, and efficient minimum-edit-distance algorithms suited for the task. These algorithms are capable of providing an account of the types (insertions, deletions, substitutions, and trans- positions) and substantive amount of amendments made between version of texts. To illustrate the usefulness and efficiency of the approach we replicate two existing stud- ies from the field of legislative studies. Our results demonstrate that minimum edit distance methods can produce superior measures of text amendments to hand-coded efforts in a fraction of the time and resource costs.

Exploring the Political Agenda of the European Parliament Using a Dynamic Topic Modeling Approach

This study analyzes the political agenda of the European Parliament (EP) plenary, how it has evolved over time, and the manner in which Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have reacted to external and internal stimuli when making plenary speeches. To unveil the plenary agenda and detect latent themes in legislative speeches over time, MEP speech content is analyzed using a new dynamic topic modeling method based on two layers of Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF). This method is applied to a new corpus of all English language legislative speeches in the EP plenary from the period 1999-2014. Our findings suggest that two-layer NMF is a valuable alternative to existing dynamic topic modeling approaches found in the literature, and can unveil niche topics and associated vocabularies not captured by existing methods. Substantively, our findings suggest that the political agenda of the EP evolves significantly over time and reacts to exogenous events such as EU Treaty referenda and the emergence of the Euro-crisis. MEP contributions to the plenary agenda are also found to be impacted upon by voting behaviour and the committee structure of the Parliament.

Unveiling the Political Agenda of the European Parliament Plenary: A Topical Analysis

This study analyzes political interactions in the European Parliament (EP) by considering how the political agenda of the plenary sessions has evolved over time and the manner in which Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have reacted to external and internal stimuli when making Parliamentary speeches. It does so by considering the context in which speeches are made, and the content of those speeches. To detect latent themes in legislative speeches over time, speech content is analyzed using a new dynamic topic modeling method, based on two layers of matrix factorization. This method is applied to a new corpus of all English language legislative speeches in the EP plenary from the period 1999-2014. Our findings suggest that the political agenda of the EP has evolved significantly over time, is impacted upon by the committee structure of the Parliament, and reacts to exogenous events such as EU Treaty referenda and the emergence of the Euro-crisis have a significant impact on what is being discussed in Parliament.