Look who's talking: Two-mode networks as representations of a topic model of New Zealand parliamentary speeches

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 Parlia...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2018-06, Vol.13 (6), p.e0199072-e0199072
Main Authors: Curran, Ben, Higham, Kyle, Ortiz, Elisenda, Vasques Filho, Demival
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Artificial intelligence
Biology and Life Sciences
Computer and Information Sciences
Databases, Factual
Debates
Dirichlet problem
Discourse analysis
Ecology and Environmental Sciences
Economic analysis
Government Employees - psychology
Humans
Legislative addresses
Legislatures
Machine learning
Members of Parliament
Methods
Models, Theoretical
Networks
New Zealand
Parliaments
People and places
Persuasive Communication
Political discourse
Political parties
Political science
Political science research
Politics
Qualitative analysis
Quantitative analysis
Research and Analysis Methods
Semantic networks
Social network analysis
Social networks
Social Sciences
Speech
Speeches
Statistical mechanics
Supervision
Technology application
Trends
Verbal Behavior
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0199072