What Does the Indian Parliament Discuss? An Exploratory Analysis of the Question Hour in the Lok Sabha
This work provides insights into Indian parliamentary discourse for political scientists and policymakers, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new dataset.
The researchers tackled the challenge of analyzing a large dataset of Indian parliamentary questions from 1999 to 2019 by performing an exploratory analysis, using text analysis tools and a dynamic topic model to reveal that the discussions reflect political and socio-economic tensions over time.
The TCPD-IPD dataset is a collection of questions and answers discussed in the Lower House of the Parliament of India during the Question Hour between 1999 and 2019. Although it is difficult to analyze such a huge collection manually, modern text analysis tools can provide a powerful means to navigate it. In this paper, we perform an exploratory analysis of the dataset. In particular, we present insightful corpus-level statistics and a detailed analysis of three subsets of the dataset. In the latter analysis, the focus is on understanding the temporal evolution of topics using a dynamic topic model. We observe that the parliamentary conversation indeed mirrors the political and socio-economic tensions of each period.