Feature Engineering for US State Legislative Hearings: Stance, Affiliation, Engagement and Absentees
This work addresses the need for automated analysis tools for political scientists and policymakers in US state legislatures, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackled the problem of analyzing US state legislative committee proceedings by engineering four features: engagement and absence for lawmakers, and stance and affiliation for non-lawmakers, with the affiliation model achieving an F1 of 0.872 and the support determination an F1 of 0.979.
In US State government legislatures, most of the activity occurs in committees made up of lawmakers discussing bills. When analyzing, classifying or summarizing these committee proceedings, some important features become broadly interesting. In this paper, we engineer four useful features, two applying to lawmakers (engagement and absence), and two to non-lawmakers (stance and affiliation). We propose a system to automatically track the affiliation of organizations in public comments and whether the organizational representative supports or opposes the bill. The model tracking affiliation achieves an F1 of 0.872 while the support determination has an F1 of 0.979. Additionally, a metric to compute legislator engagement and absenteeism is also proposed and as proof-of-concept, a list of the most and least engaged legislators over one full California legislative session is presented.