Learning Political DNA in the Italian Senate
For political scientists and control theorists studying opinion formation, this work provides a new tool to analyze voting behavior, but it is an incremental application of existing methods to a specific dataset.
The paper proposes a method to infer senators' affinity to political parties from voting records in the Italian Senate, using a sparse learning technique to select key bills and derive a new affinity measure called Political DNA. The analysis reveals underlying relationships among political exponents.
Motivated by the increasing interest of the control community towards social sciences and the study of opinion formation and belief systems, in this paper we address the problem of exploiting voting data for inferring the underlying affinity of individuals to competing ideology groups. In particular, we mine key voting records of the Italian Senate during the XVII legislature, in order to extract the hidden information about the closeness of senators to political parties, based on a parsimonious feature extraction method that selects the most relevant bills. Modeling the voting data as outcomes of a mixture of random variables and using sparse learning techniques, we cast the problem in a probabilistic framework and derive an information theoretic measure, which we refer to as Political Data-aNalytic Affinity (Political DNA). The advantages of this new affinity measure are discussed in the paper. The results of the numerical analysis on voting data unveil underlying relationships among political exponents of the Italian Senate.