Big Data Attempts To Find Meaning In 40 Years of UK Political Debate (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: International researchers have analyzed 40 years of political speeches from the UK Parliament in an effort to move the study of political theory from social science towards the quantitative analysis offered by Big Data analytics techniques. The group used Python to crunch publicly available data from theyworkforyou.com, comprising 3.7 million individual speeches. A few strange trends emerged in this initial experiment, such as the decline of 'health care' as a trending Parliamentary topic, with 'welfare' consistently on the rise, and the decrease of fervent interest in any particular topic during the more pacific years under Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

Comments

Political theory?!

[BitZtream]

Theres your problem.

There is nothing scientific about politics.

Politics are 100% emotion, just like the stock market and the economy.

These things could be based on sound deterministic things, but they will never be because they all depend on human interaction. You simply can not predict human behavior. Ever. You can make plenty of reasonable accurate generalizations, but there will always be enough people in that generalization who break it horribly and destroy any plans you made based on that generalization.

Re:Political theory?!

[AmiMoJo]

Oh, there is plenty of political theory and ideology to go around. The problem with this study is that what is said is usually nothing to do with the actual motives.

The current chancellor is a good example. Bangs on about opportunity for all, fairness, all in it together, party of the working class etc. Yet his policies are mostly designed to benefit rich people and big business. His real ideology is pretty much the opposite of what he says, so any study of his speeches is not going to produce any meaningful results.

Oxymoronic headline

[hughbar]

Attempts to find Meaning in 40 Years of UK Political Debate. Good luck with that. The answer isn't even 42, it's probably 'Punch and Judy'.

As said in Yes, Prime Minister

[sandbagger]

James Hacker: [reading a speech written for him] "We shall of course be reviewing a ... Bernard, this doesn't say anything.

Bernard Woolley: Oh, thank you , Prime Minister.

Re:As said in Yes, Prime Minister

[tsqr]

Heh. The first thing I thought of when I read the headline was a snippet from Asimov's "Foundation":

When Holk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications – in short, all the goo and dribble – he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out."

"Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed. There are the assurances you had from your precious Empire."

Re: the more pacific years ??

[RogueyWon]

I think it means "years of relative economic stability".

Don't forget that perceptions of economic (in)stability tend to affect political discourse more than any other factor. The 1984 Miner's Strike and the Iraq War excite a lot of emotion in some quarters, but don't forget that Thatcher and Blair respectively went on to win elections after both of them.

The declines of the 1979-1997 Conservative Government and the 1997-2010 Labour Governments almost certainly had more to do with a combination of general fatigue and factors that threatened economic stability (Black Monday and Europe for the former, the 2007 financial crash for the latter).

On this basis, the speeches were actually well tuned to what the majority seem to have been concerned about.