Calendar Detail

Speaker:
Sonja Zmerli and Michael Webb

This event is part of an event series „In_equality Colloquium“.

In the face of rising economic inequality in advanced democracies, understanding the nuances of political discussions on this issue becomes increasingly important. Our study delves into the debates of UK Members of Parliament (MPs) in Westminster Hall over the last twenty-four years, aiming to dissect the framing and prioritization of inequality issues. Westminster Hall debates serve as crucial platforms for MPs to highlight pressing issues, ensuring responses from ministers and party leaders. These debates, therefore, offer a rich dataset for analyzing strategic agenda-setting behaviors concerning inequality.

Our approach employs large language models (LLMs) to conduct a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of debate texts, identifying discussions relevant to various aspects of economic inequality. This methodology allows us to bypass the limitations of traditional dictionary-based methods or the need for training specific models like BERT, showcasing the potential of LLMs in expanding text analysis research capabilities.

This analysis produces a dataset that semantically codes all discussions on inequality in Westminster Hall since 2000, complemented with metadata on debates, speakers, and their constituencies. Through descriptive and inferential analyses, we reveal how MPs' approaches to discussing inequality differ by party affiliation, individual MPs, and the economic conditions of the constituencies.

Our findings suggest that political dialogue on inequality is influenced by local economic realities and varies within and across party lines. By offering a semantic mapping of inequality discussions and demonstrating the utility of LLMs in legislative analysis, our study makes significant contributions to understanding the evolution of inequality discourse in UK politics and the methodological advancements in political text analysis.

Sonja Zmerli is professor of political science at Sciences Po Grenoble - UGA. Her research focuses on themes of political behaviour with political psychology as its prioritized set of theoretical foundation. Amongst others, she has co-edited the Handbook on Political Trust and Introduction into Political Psychology (in German language) and is currently conducting an ERC Consolidator Grant (2019) on the politicization of economic inequality in three proto-typical welfare regimes..

Michael Webb is a post-doc at the University of Grenoble Alpes, Sciences Po Grenoble. His work there, as part of the POLINEQUAL project, focuses on NLP approaches to the study of inequality in France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. He received his PhD from the University of Florida in 2023 and his dissertation focused on multi-causal explanations of populist support in the United States and Europe.

Link for online participation