Issue Competition in Parliamentary Speeches? A Computer‐based Content Analysis of Legislative Debates in the Austrian Nationalrat

Ivanusch, Christoph Article — Published Version Issue Competition in Parliamentary Speeches? A Computer‐based Content Analysis of Legislative Debates in the Austrian Nationalrat Legislative Studies Quarterly Provided in Cooperation with: WZB Berlin Social Science Center Suggested Citation: Ivanusch, Christoph (2024) : Issue Competition in Parliamentary Speeches? A Computer‐based Content Analysis of Legislative Debates in the Austrian Nationalrat, Legislative Studies Quarterly, ISSN 1939-9162, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, Vol. 49, Iss. 1, pp. 203-221, https://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12421 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/308655 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 203 LegisLative studies QuarterLy, 49, 1, February 2024 dOi: 10.1111/lsq.12421 CHristOPH ivaNusCH Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) Issue Competition in Parliamentary Speeches? A Computerbased Content Analysis of Legislative Debates in the Austrian Nationalrat Parliamentary speeches are an important communication channel for political parties. a growing amount of literature suggests that parties use them to send policy signals in party competition. although this perspective has become more popular in the literature, there is a lack of studies that focus on issue competition. i take a step towards closing this research gap by using a textasdata approach to analyze parliamentary speeches in the austrian Nationalrat. the data set consists of more than 56,700 speeches given by MPs between 2002 and 2019. i apply a semisupervised technique to classify the speeches at sentence level into 20 issue categories. the analysis shows that, despite the constraining parliamentary context (e.g., legislative agenda), parties put comparatively strong emphasis on their issue preferences. the magnitude of this effect, however, depends on a party’s legislative agendasetting power. these findings confirm the presence and specific nature of issue competition in parliamentary speeches. academic interest in parliamentary speeches has grown significantly in recent years. this increased scholarly attention has broadened the view on the functions of parliamentary speeches. they are no longer seen only as an instrument to persuade other MPs and to increase the legitimacy of decision making, but are now also seen as a tool to send policy signals in party competition (Bächtiger2014; Bäck and debus2016; debus and tosun2021; Proksch and slapin2012, 2015). © 2023 the author. Legislative Studies Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Washington university in st. Louis. this is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 204 Christoph Ivanusch One of the most important aspects in party competition is issue competition. Which issues are important in the political debate can have a profound effect on policymaking (e.g., greenPedersen and Walgrave2014) and voting decisions (e.g., alvarez and Nagler1995; green and Hobolt2008). Political parties have certain issue preferences— stemming from voteseeking and policyseeking— and compete to increase the salience of these issues in the political debate. in this way, they aim to dominate the political agenda (e.g., Budge and Farlie 1983; greenPedersen 2007; Petrocik1996). Legislative debates, however, constitute a special environment. in contrast to largely unconstrained electoral competition (e.g., in manifestos), the parliamentary context strongly influences issue competition between parties. First, parliamentary debates revolve around bills and issues on the legislative agenda (Proksch and slapin2015). this limits the freedom of parties and their MPs to address issues of their choice. second, parliamentary debates are marked by partisan control of the legislative agenda (Cox and McCubbins2005). government parties often have larger agendasetting power in parliament and can shape the legislative agenda according to their own issue preferences (döring1995). However, speeches also offer some room for maneuver. although the legislative agenda puts an issue at the center of the debate, speakers can still focus on different aspects of it or link it with other issues by going “offtopic” or by applying framing. For example, although a parliamentary debate may revolve around tourism as an important economic sector, speakers may still address related issues by discussing the environmental consequences or labormarket implications of tourism. Whether parties and their MPs use this room for maneuver in parliamentary speeches to focus on their issue preferences and engage in issue competition is, however, largely unclear. although issue salience in the parliamentary arena receives an increasing amount of attention (e.g., green and Jennings2019; Meyer and Wagner2021; Quinn et al.2010), little research focuses on the dynamics of issue competition between political parties. debus and tosun(2021) take an important first step in this area by showing that green parties put more emphasis on issues related to the green agenda than other parties in parliamentary debates. this finding of a selective emphasis on issue preferences provides interesting insights, but the study also has two relevant limitations. First, the focus on a particular party family makes it difficult to generalize the results. second, the authors do not analyze the speeches 19399162, 2024, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lsq.12421 by Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin, Wiley Online Library on [17/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 205Issue Competition in Parliamentary Speeches? themselves, but rather analyze the topic of the whole debate and then survey the MPs and parties who made speeches during this debate. thus, evidence as to whether and to what extent parliamentary speeches are a tool for issue competition between parties is still limited. in this article, i argue that issue competition is present in parliamentary debates, albeit influenced by the agendasetting power of parties in parliament. i analyze more than 56,700 speeches madein the austrian Nationalrat during the legislative periods 22– 26 (december 20, 2002– October 22, 2019) and use a textasdata approach (semisupervised topic classification) to classify these speeches at sentencelevel into 20 issue categories. Based on this classification, i measure to what extent and why issue agendas differ between parties in parliamentary speeches. the results show that, although parliamentary debates offer limited room for maneuver, parties still put relatively strong emphasis on their respective issue preferences. the magnitude of this effect is, however, influenced by a party’s position in government or opposition. Overall, the results confirm that parties use parliamentary speeches to address issue preferences and thus engage in issue competition, albeit shaped by the specific context of legislative debates. Issue Competition in Parliamentary Speeches as discussed above, parliamentary debates offer a specific context for issue competition between parties. the legislative agenda and partisan control over it influence the extent to which parties and their MPs can address specific issues. the nature of parliamentary speeches, however, still offers some room for maneuver as speakers can go “offtopic” or apply framing. i expect that parties use this degree of freedom to send signals in issue competition. Political parties have certain issue preferences and selectively emphasize these issues in their communication with the aim of dominating the political agenda (e.g., Budge and Farlie1983; greenPedersen 2007; Petrocik 1996). Hence, even though the parliamentary context (e.g., legislative agenda) constrains parties, issue preferences should lead to differences in speechmaking between them. the issue preferences thereby stem from two main sources. First of all, issue preferences of parties are closely related to voteseeking and strategic considerations regarding issue 19399162, 2024, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lsq.12421 by Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin, Wiley Online Library on [17/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 206 Christoph Ivanusch ownership. issue ownership theory suggests that parties “own” certain issues, either because voters associate them with these issues or regard them as especially competent on them (Petrocik1996; Walgrave, Lefevere, and tresch2012). voters often resort to issue ownership evaluations (e.g., party competence) in their voting decisions, especially when they perceive an issue as important (Bélanger and Meguid2008). this should incentivize parties to raise the salience of “owned” issues and communicate them comparatively often. H1: Issue ownership positively influences issue salience in parliamentary speeches. second, issue preferences based on policyseeking should influence party communication in parliamentary speeches. some issues are more important to parties than others. While environmental issues are, for example, especially important for green and agrarian parties, law and order issues are particularly important for centerright parties (e.g., greenPedersen 2007). Parties aim to push these issues on the political agenda and thus increase attention to them. this is crucial as political attention to an issue is a precondition for political action and policy change (greenPedersen and Walgrave2014). the relative importance of each issue for a party is most accurately represented in manifestos. Manifestos are negotiated at length inside parties and therefore offer a “uniquely representative and authoritative characterization of party policy at a given point in time” (Budge, robertson, and Hearl1987, 18). thus, i expect the policyseeking preferences set out in manifestos to be reflected in parliamentary speechmaking. H2: High issue salience in manifestos positively influences issue salience in parliamentary speeches. However, parliamentary debates are marked by partisan control over the legislative agenda (e.g., Cox and McCubbins2005; döring1995). Hence, not every party is equally able to shape debates according to its preferences. especially government parties have more influence on which issues are discussed in parliament. thus, i expect that parties with larger legislative agendasetting power (i.e., government parties) are able to address their issue preferences more strongly. 19399162, 2024, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lsq.12421 by Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin, Wiley Online Library on [17/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 207Issue Competition in Parliamentary Speeches? H3: The influence of issue preferences on parliamentary speechmaking should be stronger for government parties than for opposition parties. Data this article analyzes parliamentary speeches in the austrian Nationalrat between december 20, 2002 and October 22, 2019 (legislative periods 22– 26). austria is an ideal case to study potential issue competition in parliamentary speeches. First, it is a multiparty system with high levels of party unity. this is the case as parties strongly control candidate selection processes ahead of elections (Müller2006) and the distribution of speaking time during legislative debates (Jenny and Müller2001; Proksch and slapin2015). second, parliamentary speeches are an important tool for political communication (e.g., schefbeck2006). these factors represent a context that should favor issue competition between parties in parliamentary speeches. Furthermore, the government– opposition dynamic in the austrian parliament is wellsuited to investigating potential effects of legislative agendasetting power on issue competition. in recent decades, two parties have typically formed a coalition government, while two to four parties have been in opposition. in parliament, most debates are devoted to bills that originate from the government or MPs of the government parties. this allows government parties a high degree of control over the legislative agenda, but opposition parties also have some instruments to bring their issues to the floor. First, parties can make use of “urgent motions” and “urgent questions” to enforce a debate on an issue. second, there are debates devoted to “topical issues” set aside in the parliamentary calendar, allowing each party group to propose an issue for discussion in a revolving system (Jenny and Müller2021; Konrath2017). the full data set used in the article contains more than 56,700 speeches, which were held by MPs during the studied time period. the main data source is the Parlspeech v2 data set by rauh and schwalbach(2020), which includes speeches until the end of 2018. to complete the data set for the entire 26th legislative periods, i collected the remaining speeches made between January 1, 2019 and October 22, 2019 via webscraping from the website of the austrian parliament. 19399162, 2024, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lsq.12421 by Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin, Wiley Online Library on [17/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 208 Christoph Ivanusch Methodology Classifying Parliamentary Speeches at Sentence Level to study this data set, i employ computerbased text analysis. Over the past years, several tools have been developed and applied to parliamentary speeches. some wellknown approaches estimate policy positions (e.g., Laver, Benoit, and garry2003; slapin and Proksch2008), while other recent approaches perform sentiment analysis (e.g., Proksch et al.2019; rudkowsky et al.2018). For the purpose of this article, it is necessary to detect issues within the speeches. Watanabe and Zhou(2022) propose a novel procedure for the creation of a seedword dictionary and a semisupervised topic classification approach, which they apply to speeches in the united Nations general assembly. the classification results delivered by this approach clearly outperform other techniques such as simple dictionary analysis or (seeded) Lda (Watanabe and Zhou2022) and has further advantages. First, semisupervised approaches allow direct interpretation of the model output as categories are clearly defined by the seedword dictionary. this is a big advantage compared to unsupervised topic models, which require exposterior interpretation of the model output and often produce topics that are inconsistent with the theoretical framework (Watanabe and Zhou2022). second, semisupervised approaches are comparatively resourceefficient because they do not require extensive manually coded training data like fully supervised models. therefore, i adapt and apply the semisupervised approach proposed by Watanabe and Zhou(2022) to analyze parliamentary speeches in three steps.1 First, i preprocessed the text data with the rpackage quanteda (Benoit et al.2018). i divided the speeches into individual sentences as the classification is performed at the sentence level. i then tokenized the sentences and performed some basic preprocessing steps. second, i created a seedword dictionary. to identify issue categories, i use the coding scheme of the Comparative agendas Project (CaP) as a point of departure.2 Parliamentary speeches, however, represent a specific context. therefore, i adapted the issue categories to fit the domainand countryspecific context (e.g., adding categories “greeting” and “parliament” to capture 19399162, 2024, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lsq.12421 by Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin, Wiley Online Library on [17/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 209Issue Competition in Parliamentary Speeches? greetings and topics related to parliamentary procedures). after defining the issue categories, i identified relevant seedwords in a twostage process as proposed by Watanabe and Zhou(2022). in the first step, i assigned knowledgebased seedwords to the issue categories. Here, significant domainand countryspecific knowledge was required to find suitable seedwords for each issue category. to complement and improve this knowledgebased dictionary, Watanabe and Zhou(2022) suggest adding frequent words to the dictionary in a second step. therefore, i checked and tested the 1,500 most frequent words from the speeches for potential new seedwords to improve the dictionary.3 Finally, i performed the classification. the seedword dictionary thereby functioned as input to a semisupervised topic classification. i use the rpackage newsmap (Watanabe2018), which classifies the individual sentences into the defined issue categories. the model first identifies seedwords from the dictionary in individual sentences (keyword matching) and assigns topic labels to them. the model then estimates the association between the topics and textual features via the cooccurrence of words (dictionarybased learning). Based on this estimation, the model assigns topic labels to all sentences (Watanabe2018). additionally, i applied contextual smoothing to take contextual information from surrounding sentences into account during the classification process (for a similar application, see Watanabe and Zhou2022). to validate the classification, i use manual coding of 600 randomly sampled speeches as a “goldstandard”.4 the classification approach applied in this article delivers a F1score of 0.61.5 this performance is comparable to results of similar advanced multicategory classification tasks (e.g., Osnabrügge et al.2021; Watanabe and Zhou2022) and therefore quite satisfactory.6 Overall, the applied technique, which was first proposed by Watanabe and Zhou(2022), delivers reliable results in a relatively resourceefficient manner. However, considerable domainand countryspecific knowledge is necessary to develop a suitable seedword dictionary. the dictionary developed in this study is tailored to the specific case and vocabulary used in austria and therefore cannot be directly transferred to other countries. this drawback poses hurdles for crosscountry analysis, and several adjustments to the dictionary would even be necessary to fit it to the context of other germanspeaking countries, for example. 19399162, 2024, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lsq.12421 by Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin, Wiley Online Library on [17/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 210 Christoph Ivanusch Measuring Issue Competition in Parliamentary Speeches Based on the hypotheses developed above, i study whether and to what extent party issue preferences in the form of issue ownership and manifesto salience drive issue communication in parliamentary speeches. the following sets of variables are used in the analysis. the dependent variable is the variation in issue communication that can be observed in parliamentary speeches. Party agendas in parliament are comparatively similar because of the influence of the legislative agenda. this analysis focuses on factors that drive potential variation between parties in parliamentary speeches. Hence, it would not be meaningful to choose the simple party issue agenda as dependent variable since i would not be able to measure variation between parties. instead, i use the measurement of speech issue variation. it is the variation in issue attention (%) for each party from the median of the issue attention for all parties during the respective legislative period.7 this measurement represents how much more or less attention a party devotes to every single issue in comparison to the other parties during a legislative period. Hence, each issue per party and per legislative period is one observation. two independent variables are used to measure the effect of party issue preferences on speech issue variation. the first independent variable is issue ownership (iO). a party is assigned a value of 1 if the party owns the issue and 0 if it does not.8 the autNes Panel study 2017 (Wagner et al.2018) provides data on issue ownership in austria. unfortunately, these types of data are only available for 2017. However, seeberg(2017) shows that issue ownership is quite stable across time. Following this argument, the values provided by Wagner et al.(2018) can be used as a basis for the whole observational period. these data allow to identify ownership for the issues “agriculture,” “economy and energy,” “environment,” “immigration,” and “labor and welfare.” thus, the variable issue ownership captures the one or two “core” issues of parties in austria. However, this variable alone does not fully reflect issue preferences, as several issues (e.g., civil rights, culture, education) are not “owned” by a party. therefore, another independent variable complements the analysis. the second independent variable covers a broader understanding of issue preferences and is called manifesto issue variation. this variable reflects the relative importance of each individual 19399162, 2024, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lsq.12421 by Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin, Wiley Online Library on [17/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 217Issue Competition in Parliamentary Speeches? article also has limitations. First, it analyzes a single case only and more studies are needed to make the findings more rigid. second, the exact mechanism and further important dynamics in relation to issue competition in parliamentary speeches are not covered in this article. Future research should therefore focus more strongly on the underlying mechanisms of issue competition in legislative debates (e.g., framing) and investigate potential dynamics stemming from different phases of the electoral cycle (e.g., “routine times of politics” vs. “campaign times”). Acknowledgement. “i wish to thank Jonathan slapin and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and guidance. i am also very grateful to Marcelo Jenny, Marius sältzer, Pola Lehmann, Lore Hayek, Kohei Watanabe and robert stelzle for helpful comments and support. additionally, the paper was greatly improved by feedback from participants at the eCPr general Conference 2021 and a workshop at the university of innsbruck.” Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt deaL. Data Availability Statement. the data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Harvard dataverse at https://doi. org/10.7910/dvN/yXXWQg. Christoph Ivanusch is a research fellow in the Horizon 2020 project “OPTED Observatory for Political Texts in European Democracies” at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and a doctoral student in Political Science at the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences (BGSS), HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin. ENDNOTES 1. a detailed explanation of the procedure is provided in appendixa. 2. the Comparative agendas Project (CaP) provides documentation on its main website: https://www.compa rativ eagen das.net/. CaP has developed a codebook consisting of 21 major topics and issue categories (Bevan2019). 3. the seedword dictionary is available in appendixB. 4. Coding instructions for manual coding and the codebook are available in appendixC. 5. the F1score is a regularly used accuracy measure in the field of computerbased text analysis (e.g., Watanabe and Zhou2022). i report the microaverage F1score. Further validation statistics per issue category are provided in appendixd. 19399162, 2024, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lsq.12421 by Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin, Wiley Online Library on [17/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 218 Christoph Ivanusch 6. in their respective applications, Osnabrügge et al.(2021) achieve a F1score of 0.54 (44 topics) and 0.64 (8 topics) on manifestos as well as 0.41 (44 topics) and 0.51 (8 topics) for parliamentary speeches; Watanabe and Zhou(2022) achieve a F1score of 0.72 (6 topics) for uN speeches. the coding scheme used in this application consists of 22 topic categories (20 issues plus the additional categories “greeting” and “parliament”). 7. i use the median and not the mean because the latter is more strongly influenced by extreme values and outliers. appendixi contains the same analysis as presented in table2, but calculated with mean values. 8. an explanation and overview of the values assigned to each party for issue ownership (iO) is presented in appendixe. 9. For an explanation of the choice of the median, see footnote 7. 10. Government participation is measured in the following way: 0— no government participation during the legislative period; 0.5— temporary government participation during the legislative period, 1— government participation during the whole legislative period. 11. the issue agendas (%) for the other covered legislative periods (22, 23, 24, and 26) are given in appendixF. 12. appendicesH, i and J contain robustness checks for the regression models reported in table2. appendixH shows the regression model reported in the main article without the outlier at point (38/3.8). the model in appendixi uses mean values to calculate the variables speech issue variation and manifesto issue variation instead of median values. appendixJ reports models that use alternative combinations of clustered standard errors and fixed effects to account for the data structure. the main findings remain largely stable across the different specifications. REFERENCES alvarez, r. 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