The Past and the Future in European Parliamentary Debates #dhh19 - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

The Past and the Future in European Parliamentary Debates

#dhh19

Structure

1. Research Plan & Questions 2. Results 3. Challenges 4. Outlook

Research question - original

How does the European Parliament talk about ‘the future’ and ‘the past’? How do these ideas change over time in expression and content? How do they differ between political parties, fractions, ages, genders, geographical regions, etc?

Research question - updated

How does the European Parliament talk about ‘the future’ and ‘the past’? How do these ideas change over time in expression and content? How do they differ between political parties, fractions, ages, genders, geographical regions, etc?

Research Plan & Workflow – all done!

➔ formulate research question ➔ create theoretical groundwork ➔ prepare data ➔ develop tools and pipeline ➔ create subcorpora ➔ analyse subcorpora ➔ interpret results ➔ visualize results

Update on Communications

the future “what we think, know, hope and fear will happen” subjective & influenced by our morals, ideologies, politics and ideas

political discourse & debate

history “what we think happened” selective, subjective & influenced by our morals, ideologies, politics and ideas the past “what really happened”

• bjective, but unreachable

the future “what we think, know, hope and fear will happen” subjective & influenced by our morals, ideologies, politics and ideas

political discourse & debate

history “what we think happened” selective, subjective & influenced by our morals, ideologies, politics and ideas the past “what really happened”

• bjective, but unreachable

Motivation

“The fact that the outermost regions exist is tied up to a large degree with colonial history. In the Middle Ages, those regions and their people did not belong to Europe, and even today, they are not really considered to be European.” (Erik Meijer, 25 October 2000, Strasbourg)

Whole corpus

• 247.955 speeches in English
• 50.432.891 words
• 2.004.716 sentences
• metadata:

○ speaker: name ○ speaker: country ○ speaker: political functions ○ speaker: gender ○ speech: date ○ speech: topic

• 2013 change in Protocol
• after 2013 99.7% of english speeches

from UK and Ireland.

Creating Subcorpora

Creating Subcorpora

Past 13.230 speeches Future 5.430 speeches Totalitarianism 4.517 speeches Climate change 13.541 speeches Overall: 247.955 speeches

Discussion of findings

Key Results

How does the European Parliament talk about ‘the past’ and ‘the future’? Past ↔ Future Past: common European history, including institutional, cultural and territorial developments of the EU Future: economic growth, stabilisation → environmental policy

General Findings

Construction of Future

What can you do (more) with: Past | Future

Topic Modelling

Topic Modelling

Sentiment Analysis

Suh

• Speakers seem to be less

emotional and more concrete while talking about the future.

• The results are similar for

genders and countries.

Sentiment Analysis

Past Future

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Count

Qualitative Analysis

Case Study: 20th Century Totalitarianism

“In other words, in Europe the transnational memory runs up against a variety of national memory constellations and collisions.” (Assmann 2006) Research Question: How is the horseshoe theory present in discourse on the topic and how does it differ by region (East/West)?

Hitler and Stalin are strongly connected in discourse, with no significant differences between East and West → i.e. “Hitler” most frequently mentioned with “Stalin” and vice versa

Case Study: 20th Century Totalitarianism

→ The collective suffering of almost all EU member states under Nazism or Stalinism can potentially serve as a framework for a transnational culture of remembrance and historical identity. → Further analyses on the topic are needed in regard to the variables of age and political ideology, where there may be significant differences in potentially equating Stalinism and National Socialism. Sentiment analysis could be useful in this regard.

Case Study: The Climate Crisis

“Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time.” - Peter Mandelson, European Parliament plenary session 23.10.2007 Research Question: How is climate change talked about in the European Parliament? Are there differences in the way different countries speak of climate change?

Case Study: The Climate Crisis

Climate change, CO2/carbon dioxide, emissions, greenhouse gases, acid rain/ozone layer, global warming, renewable energy, alternative sources of energy, Kyoto protocol, climate conference, environmental regime, energy efficiency, carbon footprint, carbon tax, biofuel, emission targets, paris agreement, emission trading, carbon neutrality, climate scepticism, cutting carbon emissions, Polar ice cap, biodiversity, fluorinated, fuel consumption, IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report

Case Study: The Climate Crisis

Case Study: The Climate Crisis

Case Study: The Climate Crisis

Case Study: The Climate Crisis

False positive (1, 1)

“Climate change is the greatest challenge facing life on our planet, the biggest problem facing

• ur governments, and a gnawing worry for our citizens”

False negative (-0.15, 0.75)

"Therefore it is absolutely necessary to bring them on board so that we can fight climate change together, but according to the common but differentiated principle of the United Nations Convention"

Case Study: The Climate Crisis

Finland Spain

Challenges

Defining the past and the future:

• How to detect it in the corpus?

Data:

• Missing English translated speeches and

missing metadata

• English corpus included other languages
• Problems with variables within the data
• Drop in number of speeches after 2013

Outlook

Still more work to do:

• Look at differences between political parties
• Issues with the dataset should be resolved
• Dataset could be updated with more recent data

Reviews of the group

“10/10 would hack again.” – Fredrik Norén ★★★★★ “All group members are very intelligent and attractive.” – Andrey Indukaev

One more thing…. Don’t forget to vote on Saturday/ Sunday!