What do danish politicians talk about?
Political parties brand themselves with particular ideologies and policy goals, but do they actually live up to them? But are the politicians you voted for talking about the topics you expected them to cover in parliament? Which parties speak about what? Who speaks about the environment, who speaks about labour rights, what about COVID, etc?
Last year we scraped multiple years of speeches in the Danish Parliament (read more here about how we did it, and our first piece on analyzing this data where we show women speak less than men). Using data science methods we can unpack what politicians talk about. To do this we are using a tool from information theory called pointwise mutual information (PMI). PMI measures the mutual dependence between two variables, in our case between politicians and the words they use. We are not going to bore you with the math, but basically PMI measures how often two things appear together (a word and a politician) vs the probability of each of them appearing in general.
(We could also have looked at how many times each word is used and counted them up, however, this would disadvantage parties with few members, or parties who speak a lot, so we are not going to do that.)
Please note that our analysis does not look into what context words and terms are used in, whether they are positively or negatively used. We only focus on which terms are statistically more likely to be used by the different parties. For a more context specific analysis stay tuned.
Running our PMI analysis on speeches from 2013 to 2021 we find a couple of interesting tings, and some not super-surprising connections - see images below for the top 16 terms for each party in the Danish Parliament.
Some highlights include:
The social democrats (S), who are currently in power, talk statistically more about COVID, epidemics, and a re-opening plan. Interestingly, they also talk about “nulvækst” (zero growth) which is a political way of saying that the governmental budgets will not grow.
The main opposition party (V), also called Venstre (liberals) focus more on plans, frameworks, reforms, and spending freezes.
The nationalist and right wing party (DF), also called Dansk Folkeparti, speak significantly more about immigration, stopping islamization, protecting christianity, the father country, and many other very nationalistic terms.
The socialist and green party (Ø), Enhedslisten, focus their speaking time on privatization (against), Goldman Sachs (which bought the biggest danish energy company), the situation in Syria (Kobane is a city in Syria), refugees, and unemployment benefits.
Check out the party you voted for below, and ask yourself, are they really focusing on the stuff you want them to be focusing on in parliament? Does it correspond with how the communicate on Facebook, in the media, and leading up to elections?
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