Estimating Government Discretion in Fiscal Policy Making

Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) is a relatively new approach to describe macroeconomic differences across countries, classifying them into coordinated market economies (CMEs) and liberal market economies (LMEs). VoC already had a significant impact on the field but has been criticised for its lack of linkage to political systems. Recent studies focused on the similarities between CMEs and the Lijphartian consensus political systems, and LMEs and majoritarian political systems. One of the practical consequences of this classification is that governments in LMEs should enjoy more discretion over fiscal policy while governments in CMEs are more constrained in their decisions. In this paper we evaluate this proposition in two LME states -- Ireland and the UK -- where the latter is an example of a pure majoritarian state while the former bares several institutional characteristics of the consensus state (e.g. electoral system and coalition governments). We show that governments in both states enjoy relatively high degrees of discretion over fiscal policy, but that in Ireland policy outcomes are more well balanced in respect to interests represented by social partners. We thus provide empirical evidence that supports the classification proposed in the VoC approach. However, we also demonstrate that the context of decision-making has a crucial impact on the discretionary power of government, and that such context effects can change over time, even within the same system type.fiscal policy, computerised text analysis, EU Structural Funds, budgetary process

A new Database of Parliamentary Debates in Ireland, 1922--2008

We present a new database of parliamentary debates and written answers in Dáil Éireann for the entire time period from the third Dáil in 1922 to the thirtieth Dáil in 2008. This database was built from the Official Records of the Houses of the Oireachtas. Unlike its original version, our database integrates information about debates and information about deputies into a single database. This database therefore allows to search and retrieve contributions from individual deputies of the Dáil (Teachta Dála or TD) and to combine information about TDs' parties and constituencies with the history of political speeches and written answers. In addition, our database facilitates the application of content analysis software such as Wordscore (Laver, Benoit and Garry, 2003) or Wordfish (Slapin and Proksch, 2008) and makes it possible to estimate TDs' policy preferences from speeches. In this paper we document the structure of the database and how it was generated. We furthermore demonstrate how political debates can be used in social science research through a series of examples. These include an analysis of the policy agenda in all budget speeches from 1922 to today, the estimation of speakers' policy positions in the 2008 budget debate, and the estimation of ministers' policy positions in the 26th government in 2002.parliamentary debates, policy point estimation, budget speeches, text analysis

What Drives the International Development Agenda? An NLP Analysis of the United Nations General Debate 1970-2016

There is surprisingly little known about agenda setting for international development in the United Nations (UN) despite it having a significant influence on the process and outcomes of development efforts. This paper addresses this shortcoming using a novel approach that applies natural language processing techniques to countries' annual statements in the UN General Debate. Every year UN member states deliver statements during the General Debate on their governments' perspective on major issues in world politics. These speeches provide invaluable information on state preferences on a wide range of issues, including international development, but have largely been overlooked in the study of global politics. This paper identifies the main international development topics that states raise in these speeches between 1970 and 2016, and examine the country-specific drivers of international development rhetoric

Transfer Topic Labeling with Domain-Specific Knowledge Base: An Analysis of UK House of Commons Speeches 1935-2014

Topic models are widely used in natural language processing, allowing researchers to estimate the underlying themes in a collection of documents. Most topic models use unsupervised methods and hence require the additional step of attaching meaningful labels to estimated topics. This process of manual labeling is not scalable and suffers from human bias. We present a semi-automatic transfer topic labeling method that seeks to remedy these problems. Domain-specific codebooks form the knowledge-base for automated topic labeling. We demonstrate our approach with a dynamic topic model analysis of the complete corpus of UK House of Commons speeches 1935-2014, using the coding instructions of the Comparative Agendas Project to label topics. We show that our method works well for a majority of the topics we estimate; but we also find that institution-specific topics, in particular on subnational governance, require manual input. We validate our results using human expert coding

Entgrenzung und Begrenzung Alexanders des Großen: äußere Grenzen im griechischen Alexanderroman, dem Schāhnāmeh und in der altrussischen Aleksandrija

Die Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit den Ausprägungen von Be- und Entgrenzungen Alexanders des Großen in drei räumlich, zeitlich und kulturell verschiedenen Versionen des Alexanderromans: dem griechschen Alexanderroman des Pseudo-Kallisthenes, der altrussischen Chronographischen Aleksandrija und dem neupersischen Eskandar-Epos in Ferdousis Schahnameh

Complex Politics: A Quantitative Semantic and Topological Analysis of UK House of Commons Debates

This study is a first, exploratory attempt to use quantitative semantics techniques and topological analysis to analyze systemic patterns arising in a complex political system. In particular, we use a rich data set covering all speeches and debates in the UK House of Commons between 1975 and 2014. By the use of dynamic topic modeling (DTM) and topological data analysis (TDA) we show that both members and parties feature specific roles within the system, consistent over time, and extract global patterns indicating levels of political cohesion. Our results provide a wide array of novel hypotheses about the complex dynamics of political systems, with valuable policy applications

Stereoelectronic effects in RNase-catalysed reactions of dinucleoside phosphate cleavage

AbstractThe rate at which dinucleoside phosphates are cleaved by RNases is supposed to be determined by the mole fraction of enzyme-substrate complexes in which the phosphodiester moiety of a dinucleoside phosphate has a highly reactive conformation. The mole fraction of such complexes for a particular RNase depends on the nature of a nucleoside at the O5'-end of the phosphodiester bond. Experimental data are presented to support this hypothesis