The Increased Effect of Elections and Changing Prime Ministers on Topics Discussed in the Australian Federal Parliament between 1901 and 2018

TL;DR

This study analyzes how elections and prime minister changes influence parliamentary discussion topics in Australia from 1901 to 2018, revealing increasing effects over time and topic shifts linked to political events.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive dataset and applies advanced modeling to quantify the impact of political events on parliamentary discourse over more than a century.

Findings

Prime minister changes influence discussion topics even without party change.

The effect of elections on topics has grown since the 1980s.

Topic shifts are linked to political events over time.

Abstract

Politics and discussion in parliament is likely to be influenced by the party in power and associated election cycles. However, little is known about the extent to which these events affect discussion and how this has changed over time. We systematically analyse how discussion in the Australian Federal Parliament changes in response to two types of political events: elections and changed prime ministers. We use a newly constructed dataset of what was said in the Australian Federal Parliament from 1901 through to 2018 based on extracting and cleaning available public records. We reduce the dimensionality of discussion in this dataset by using a correlated topic model to obtain a set of comparable topics over time. We then relate those topics to the Comparative Agendas Project, and then analyse the effect of these two types of events using a Bayesian hierarchical Dirichlet model. We find that: changes in prime minister tend to be associated with topic changes even when the party in power does not change; and the effect of elections has been increasing since the 1980s, regardless of whether the election results in a change of prime minister.