Complex Politics: A Quantitative Semantic and Topological Analysis of UK House of Commons Debates
This provides novel hypotheses about political dynamics with policy applications, but it is an exploratory and incremental approach.
The study tackled the problem of understanding systemic patterns in political systems by analyzing UK House of Commons debates from 1975 to 2014 using dynamic topic modeling and topological data analysis, revealing consistent roles for members and parties and global patterns of political cohesion.
This study is a first, exploratory attempt to use quantitative semantics techniques and topological analysis to analyze systemic patterns arising in a complex political system. In particular, we use a rich data set covering all speeches and debates in the UK House of Commons between 1975 and 2014. By the use of dynamic topic modeling (DTM) and topological data analysis (TDA) we show that both members and parties feature specific roles within the system, consistent over time, and extract global patterns indicating levels of political cohesion. Our results provide a wide array of novel hypotheses about the complex dynamics of political systems, with valuable policy applications.