Methods for Analyzing Parliamentary Debates

This chapter provides an overview of popular and recent methods for analyzing the text of legislative debates. It splits commonly used methods into three types: methods that analyze the volume of activity by members, ones that create measures of latent concepts, and ones that analyze the content of speeches. After providing an overview of popular methods as well as guidance to applied researchers, each section concludes by discussing a handful of recent papers that provide some important methodological innovations that may be useful in other domains. It concludes by discussing the small-but-growing literature on making causal inferences when using text.