How do opposition parties in Parliamentary democracies challenge the majority coalition? What do legislative political losers do in order to turn the tables and become winners? This research project uses legislative speech in parliamentary democracies as quantitative data, in order to analyze the ways in which opposition parties try to manipulate the dimensions of the legislative agenda, and thus split the majority coalition. The investigator assumes that opposition parties use speech strategically, i.e., they choose to address issues that might have high potential of splitting the majority. The probability of splitting the majority coalition increases when dormant issues that are not highly correlated with the dominant ideological dimension become more salient, and when the priorities of coalition members (parties, factions, legislators) with regard to these are diverse.
This model is tested using speech data from three democratic parliamentary legislatures: The British, the Israeli, and the Hungarian. The investigator focuses on important periods in the political histories of these countries-the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the mid 1990's, the process leading to the return of the Labor party under Tony Blair to power in the UK after 18 years of Conservative rule, and the era following the democratization in Hungary. The findings will thus help explain legislative dynamics under different institutions and historical trajectories, and will have implications for a variety of parliamentary democracies.
The analysis would offer insights into the "black box" of legislative democratic politics, by shedding light on an underdeveloped literature of parliamentary activity: given the fact that the parliamentary opposition is numerically and institutionally disadvantaged, what do the losers do to become winners? This question is central to our understanding of democratic institutions. In addition, the research introduces a novel methodology to operationalize and measure legislative opposition strategy. Finally, data sets, including the rhetorical data, and the findings will become available for further research.
Scholars of legislative parties and institutions have been studying legislative parties' strategy for decades, focusing on voting behavior. The goal of this project was to extend our knowledge of legislative behavior by collecting and analyzing an underutilized yet invaluable data source -- legislative speeches. Theoretically, we followed other scholars in assuming that in democratic legislatures, politicians choose to emphasize issues that they think give them an advantage over their opponents. Thus, politicians do not really argue over the same policies, but are much more likely to emphasize issues they "own". This theoretical understanding is what led us to use our statistical methodology. The methodology is based on collecting data that capture all the words that were spoken in a given legislative assembly during a given period. We then divide these datasets into smaller units --sentences, utterances, discussions and so on, and tag these by political party and speaker. We then use statistical models to estimate the topics of these rhetorical units, and use the frequency of these topics to test our hypotheses. The overarching claim of the project is that parties use speeches strategically. In order to demonstrate that, we first defined our expectations of what this 'strategy' would be: We hypothesized that parties would use their speeches in order to try to split the opposing political coalition, but that this strategy would be limited by the structure of political topics. Specifically, if political topics are cross-cutting (that is, they split the opposing political camp as well as your own), then the likelihood of using these topics would be reduced. Furthermore, we hypothesized that different types of opposition would use different types of rhetorical strategies. For example, we surmised that that anti-system parties (parties that do not recognize state institutions) would not only criticize the government, but would rather call for the change of the entire political structure. We also hypothesized that exogenous shocks (rapid changes) to the political system, create windows of opportunity for rhetorical attacks, especially by the opposition. In order to achieve the project's goals, we hired a number of programmers and students with country specific expertise, that would assist us with data collection. We chose to analyze legislative rhetoric from three countries: Israel, UK and Greece. These countries vary greatly in terms of political culture, history, parties and institutions. Choosing these countries also enabled us to share the project with a large number of students and assistants, who gained valuable experience in terms of computer programming, exposure to social science methodologies and theories, as well as data collection. Our analysis of the Israeli case revealed that given an exogenous political intervention, the left-wing opposition was able to strategically reframe the main issue in the Israeli political agenda --security. By doing so, the opposition created an impossible situation for the government. This nuanced strategy eventually led to the collapse of the right-wing coalition government, and to the victory of leftists in the following election. Thus, we were able to statistically demonstrate that a rhetorical attack for at least partially responsible for an oppositional victory. Our analysis of the British parliament demonstrated how problematic rhetorical strategies are. Here, we focused on the issue of European integration. This issue has threatened to split both the Conservative and the Labor for decades. Given the complexity of the issue, we found that both parties refrain from using it, as opposed to the Israeli case. Using quantitative analysis of debates of the topic of European integration ,we were also able to shoe the exact ways in which the issue splits both left and right. In Greece, we found that opposition is a multi-faceted phenomenon. First, after the shock of the severe economic crisis, we found that parties that cooperate in government actually behave in a way we defined as "oppositional". That is, they tend to use oppositional tools such as parliamentary questions to a larger extent than opposition parties. We were also able to uncover different "types" of oppositional rhetoric, with anti-system parties using their floor speeches to attack the entire political structure, rather than the opposition political camp. Overall, in addition to being a part of a growing literature in political science that uses words-as-data, our project was novel in incorporating legislative speeches into the study of legislatures. Our results demonstrate how valuable legislative rhetoric is as an analytical tool, and how much it can teach us about political strategy and ideology. Furthermore, over the course of working in the project, we gained additional methodological skills. We also published our results in peer-reviewed journals, and are currently working on additional submissions. In addition, we were able to offer a number of students a unique opportunity to gain valuable experience and training. Finally, the data collected is now available for further analysis by the scientific community.
