Suchergebnisse

There are three purposes of this paper. The first is to see whether parliamentary speech can be used to classify Australian federal parliamentarians from the main two political groups (the Australian Labor Party and the Liberal National Party Coalition) into their respective groupings. I use machine learning and text analysis to create a classifier which is able to do this with 76% accuracy. The second aim is to use the probability scores generated by the classifier to place ALP and LNPC parliamentarians on an ideological spectrum. This rankingprocedure enables us to see who the moderates and extremes are within the ALP and the LNPC. The third purposes is to demonstrate how scoring parliamentarians according to their ideological orientation can be used to provide insight into several political phenomena. I discuss several general applications of ideological scores. I also provide specific examples of how such quantitative scores can shed light on qualitative discussions of the ideology of parliamentarians and show how such scores can be used to explain party leader selection processes.

There have been significant social and political changes in Australian society since federation in 1901. The issues that are considered politically salient have also changed significantly. The purpose of this article is to examine changes in the style and content of election campaign speeches over the period 1901 – 2016. The corpus consists of 88 election campaign speeches delivered by the Prime Minister and Opposition leader for the 45 elections from 1901 to 2016. I use natural language processing to extract from the speeches a number of linguistic variables which serve as independent variables and use the year of delivery as the dependent variable. I then use use machine learning to develop a regression model which explains 77 per cent of the variance in the dependent variable. Examination of the salient independent variables shows that there have been significant linguistic changes in the style and content of election speeches over the study period. In particular, speeches have become less linguistically complex, less analytical, more focused on work and the home, and contain more social references. I discuss these changes in the context of changes in Australian society over the study period.

The purpose of this article is to examine the psychological elements of the ideology of members of the major parties in the Australian federal parliament using computational linguistics. The cohort consists of the 485 Labor, Liberal and National parliamentarians who were in parliament over the period April 1996 to July 2014. I use computational linguistics to extract linguistic variables from first speeches in parliament of those in the cohort. I draw from methods used in machine learning to develop a classifier which has a 74% out of sample (leave-one-out cross validation) accuracy in classifying parliamentarians as liberal (ALP) or conservative (Liberal/National Party Coalition). I then examine the salient variables and find that there are only six linguistic markers of conservative/liberal ideology. Of these, two are consistent with the previous findings that liberals tend to display more psychological 'openness' than conservatives and less psychological 'conscientiousness'. However, one of these variables strongly challenges the idea that conservatives look to the past and liberals to the future. Two of the six linguistic variables are 'suppressor' variables and I discuss these variables in the context of their role in suppressing 'irrelevant' variance in the other independent variables.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that were associated with cabinet appointment in the Howard Government 1996 – 2007. Broadly, the factors that are cited as important in cabinet appointment in general fall into two categories: the representational and the personal. The representational factors are those that are associated related to an individual's role as a "representative". The personal factors are those that are associated with an individual's personal qualities. Thus, an individual who impresses the selectorate with her oratorical or technical skills may stand a higher chance of being selected than another individual who does not have such skills. In this paper I will demonstrate that the representational factors provide negligible explanation for cabinet appointments in the Howard government. In contrast, the personal factors were significantly more important. In particular, I identify the level of concreteness/abstractness in a parliamentarian's first speech in parliament as an important factor.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that were associated with cabinet appointment in the Howard Government 1996 – 2007. Broadly, the factors that are cited as important in cabinet appointment in general fall into two categories: the representational and the personal. The representational factors are those that are associated related to an individual's role as a "representative". The personal factors are those that are associated with an individual's personal qualities. Thus, an individual who impresses the selectorate with her oratorical or technical skills may stand a higher chance of being selected than another individual who does not have such skills. In this paper I will demonstrate that the representational factors provide negligible explanation for cabinet appointments in the Howard government. In contrast, the personal factors were significantly more important. In particular, I identify the level of concreteness/abstractness in a parliamentarian's first speech in parliament as an important factor.