Issue Salience and Legislative Responsiveness

Research question/goal: 

The project aims to apply automatic face detection and face recognition to analyze parliamentary video recordings. This allows generating a proposal-specific measure of the parliamentary attendance of legislators, where attendance indicates the level of salience attributed to individual issues by political actors. The proposal-specific salience measure is used to investigate the degree to which salience perceptions influences bargaining interactions at the parliamentary stage and, hence, the substance of reform proposals. For the empirical application, we study the Landtag Baden-Württemberg in three legislative periods, from 2006 onwards.

The project will be continued within the framework of the Collaborative Research Center SFB 884 "Political Economy of Reforms".

Fact sheet

Funding: 
MZES
Duration: 
2014 to 2017
Status: 
continued elsewhere
Data Sources: 
Video footage of parliamentary debates
Geographic Space: 
Germany, Baden-Württemberg

Publications

Book Chapters

Nyhuis, Dominic, Tobias Ringwald, Oliver Rittmann, Thomas Gschwend and Rainer Stiefelhagen (2022): Automated video analysis for social science research. Pp. 386-398 in: Uwe Engel, Anabel Quan-Haase, Sunny Liu, Lars E. Lyberg (Eds.) Handbook of computational social science, vol. 2: Data science, statistical modeling, and machine learning methods. New York: Routledge. more

Conference Presentations

Behrens, Lion, Dominic Nyhuis and Thomas Gschwend (2021): Coalition Policymaking and Opposition Legislative Review: Collaboration, Bill Obstruction, and Issue-Ownership. [11th Annual Meeting of the European Political Science Association, (virtual conference), June 24th to June 25th, 2021] more