Analyzing the Agenda of the U.K. Parliament Over the Long Run
Working Paper 30021
DOI 10.3386/w30021
Issue Date
This article develops a method for quantitatively tracking the agenda of the British Parliament—by which I mean the substantive topics on which Parliamentary debate was focused—from 1810-2005 using descriptions of 1.7 million Parliamentary debates from the Parliamentary Hansard. This provides a new tool for analyzing the evolution of the British political system across nearly two centuries. I describe and validate this new measure and then present an application that focuses on assessing the influence of the party in government on the Parliamentary agenda.