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

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  • Greene, Derek
  • Cross, James P.

Abstract

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 to 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 behavior and the committee structure of the Parliament.

Suggested Citation

  • Greene, Derek & Cross, James P., 2017. "Exploring the Political Agenda of the European Parliament Using a Dynamic Topic Modeling Approach," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 25(1), pages 77-94, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:polals:v:25:y:2017:i:01:p:77-94_00
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    Cited by:

    1. Ola G. El‐Taliawi & Nihit Goyal & Michael Howlett, 2021. "Holding out the promise of Lasswell's dream: Big data analytics in public policy research and teaching," Review of Policy Research, Policy Studies Organization, vol. 38(6), pages 640-660, November.
    2. Yan Zhihua & Tang Xijin, 2020. "Exploring Evolution of Public Opinions on Tianya Club Using Dynamic Topic Models," Journal of Systems Science and Information, De Gruyter, vol. 8(4), pages 309-324, August.
    3. Imke Rhoden & Christopher Stephen Ball & Stefan Vögele & Wilhelm Kuckshinrichs, 2023. "Minding the gap‐relating disclosure to contexts of sustainability reporting in the automotive industry," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 30(2), pages 846-857, March.
    4. Roman Senninger & Daniel Bischof, 2018. "Working in unison: Political parties and policy issue transfer in the multilevel space," European Union Politics, , vol. 19(1), pages 140-162, March.
    5. Michal Ovádek & Nicolas Lampach & Arthur Dyevre, 2020. "What’s the talk in Brussels? Leveraging daily news coverage to measure issue attention in the European Union," European Union Politics, , vol. 21(2), pages 204-232, June.
    6. Ancil Crayton, 2018. "Central Bank Communication and the Yield Curve: A Semi-Automatic Approach using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization," Papers 1809.08718, arXiv.org.
    7. Stefanie Walter & Lucy Kinski & Zsófia Boda, 2023. "Who talks to whom? Using social network models to understand debate networks in the European Parliament," European Union Politics, , vol. 24(2), pages 410-423, June.
    8. Shah Jahan Miah & Huy Quan Vu & Damminda Alahakoon, 2022. "A social media analytics perspective for human‐oriented smart city planning and management," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 73(1), pages 119-135, January.

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