House of Commons Parliamentary Debates, 1979-2019

Blumenau, Jack (2021). House of Commons Parliamentary Debates, 1979-2019. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-854292

Discussion and debate lie at the heart of democratic politics. When asked to think about politics in the UK, many people would recall images of the Prime Minister standing at the dispatch box, clashing with the Leader of the Opposition over topical issues. Similarly, many key events in the political calendar - the Budget, the Queen's Speech - revolve around large, high-profile debates on the floor of the Commons.
However, aside from these limited cases, most parliamentary debates pass unnoticed by those outside of Westminster. This is unfortunate, as parliamentary speechmaking is a central democratic responsibility of elected politicians, and debates provide MPs with the opportunity to scrutinise government policy, and to voice the concerns and interests of their constituents.
Political scientists have made a great deal of progress in analysing parliamentary debate in recent years, with significant attention devoted to using speeches to uncover underlying ideological preferences of MPs, or estimating the priorities that MPs place on different policy issues. However, while these features of political debate are important, when politicians speak, they are usually doing more than expressing their position on an ideological spectrum, or adding to the volume of words uttered on a given topic. Rather, politicians use speeches for a wide range of purposes: to influence the course of debate, to provide responses to questions, to persuade their audience of particular view point, and so on.
This project moves beyond existing research by developing new ways to extract meaning from the speeches made by politicians. To do so, I will design new statistical methodologies for understanding three different features of political speech. In particular, I will develop methods to measure:
1) how responsive ministers are to questions put to them from backbench MPs,
2) which politicians are influential in parliamentary debates, and
3) how MPs use rhetoric to make their speeches more persuasive.
I will apply these new methods to the full collection of parliamentary debates from the beginning of Clement Attlee's government in 1945, to the end of the 2015 legislative session. Applying new measures to this large collection of political speeches will add depth to our understanding of the ways in which MPs deliberate over policy, and thus will provide new insights into the legislative process in the UK. Have ministers become less accountable to the legislature over time? Are different MPs influential in different policy areas? Has the style of parliamentary rhetoric changed in recent years? These are the questions that this project seeks to answer.
More generally, the explosion of digitised political text online provides an excellent opportunity for us to better understand the ways in which our democratic representatives navigate the policymaking process. The methodologies developed in this project will contribute to a growing area of research that provides tools to capitalise on these new sources of data, with the aim of improving our knowledge of the behaviour of political actors.
There is a strong appetite amongst the public and journalists for information about how MPs act and interact in parliament. As evidenced by popular websites like TheyWorkForYou.com and PublicWhip.org.uk, data resources and statistical summaries of MPs' behaviour play a key role in public oversight of political figures. This project will increase the ability of politically-engaged individuals to understand the legislative behaviour of members of parliament. In doing so, it will also provide new insights about what politicians say, and the motivations behind why they are saying it.

Data description (abstract)

How do politicians make political arguments? What has changed in the substantive agenda of the House of Commons over time? How do MPs represent the interests of their constituents? Such questions can only be answered with rich data on the behaviour of politicians across a wide variety of policy areas. To this end, this submission contains data on all parliamentary debates held in the House of Commons between 1979 and 2019. In total, the data includes over 2.5 million speeches drawn from over 50 thousand parliamentary debates. The data includes the raw texts of the speeches delivered in the Commons, as well as a wide variety of metadata about MPs and debates. This data is likely to be useful to a wide variety of scholars in legislative politics and political communication.

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