How to Analyse Speeches and Legislative Debates

Abstract

This chapter deals with methodological issues and comprises three main parts. The first describes the research design and case selection, illustrates the context of legislative debates in the seven countries analysed here and describes some of the differences and similarities across the cases. The second discusses whether an analysis of legislative speeches can give us information on ‘unity’ or ‘cohesion’ within parties, and whether they tell us something about individual MPs’ policy positions; it also describes some of the advantages and problems of analysing speeches for this purpose. The third part explains the specific computerised content analysis technique we use, Wordscores, and how it is applied here in the empirical analyses presented in Chapter 5.