DIRKMJK

Nederlands - Ik heb de hoofdrolspelers in de twitterdiscussie over de verkiezing van de nieuwe FNV-voorzitter in beeld gebracht. Omdat de grafiek niet in deze kolom past, heb ik er een aparte pagina voor gemaakt. Werkt het best met Chrome.

English - I’ve visualised the key players in the debate on Twitter on the election of the new president of the Dutch trade union confederation FNV. Since it doesn’t fit in this column, I’ve created a separate page. Best viewed in Chrome.

Nice: der Spiegel has launched a data blog, Datenlese. One of the first posts analyses questions asked by members of the lower house, the Bundestag. I thought it might be interesting to compare these findings to the Dutch situation. Unfortunately, der Spiegel doesn’t appear to publish the actual dataset they use in their analysis (unlike, for example, the Guardian Data Blog, which usually provides a spreadsheet with all the relevant data). [Update: the author kindly provides a link to the dataset here]

However, the Bundestag does publish statistics of parliamentary initiatives, as does the Dutch Tweede Kamer. A few conclusions:

• The Bundestag asks about 75 questions per month. The Tweede Kamer more than three times as many, even though the Bundestag has four times as many members.
• Written questions are primarily a tool for the opposition, but more so in Germany than in the Netherlands. In Germany, only 1% of questions are asked by members of coalition parties. In the Netherlands, 17% (or even 33% if former quasi-coalition party PVV is included).
• In Germany, most questions are asked by the left-wing party die Linke and by the green party. Far fewer questions are asked by the social-democrats. A spokesperson told der Spiegel that the party knows from its experience as a former government party that questions ‘can paralyse the entire apparatus’. In the Netherlands, the social-democrats asked the largest number of questions in 2011. This hasn’t always been the case: when the social-democrats were still in government, they asked fewer questions and the left-wing SP headed the list.

Data

Statistics of the current session of the Bundestag can be found here (pdf). Apparently, there is a distinction between ‘small’ and ‘large’ questions; the latter resulting in a debate. The number of large questions is very small; like der Spiegel I focused on the little questions. The Tweede Kamer is quite a bit slower than the Bundestag in publishing its statistics; I used the figures for 2011 published here.

Graphs may not be visible in older versions of Internet Explorer.

Number of times countries are mentioned by year

Select country:

Codeyear offers a course on how to use the API of the Sunlight Foundation to search transcripts of the US Congress. I used this approach to find out how often foreign countries are discussed in Congress. A simple inspection of the total frequencies suggests two conclusions:

• Interest in foreign countries rose under the ‘Bush doctrine’ and fell since the start of the current economic crisis;
• There are often peaks during odd years. Plausibly, Congress focuses more on domestic issues in even years, when there are elections for Congress.

Of course, the pattern may be different for individual countries (use the selector under the line graph to see data on individual countries). For example, interest in Afghanistan took off after 9/11; for Hong Kong it peaked in 1997 (transfer of sovereignty); for Serbia, Kosovo and Albania in 1999 (NATO bombing campaign); for Tunisia in 2011 (Arab Spring) and interest in Austria took off in 2009 (well that’s actually a mistake: in 2009, somebody named Steve Austria joined the US House of Representatives, boosting the number of times the term ‘Austria’ appears in transcripts).

Number of times countries are mentioned by population, GDP and trade

The scatterplots illustrate how the total number of times a country has been discussed in Congress over the period 1996-2012 is associated with population size, GDP and the amount of trade between that country and the US (note that the scales are log scales, a feature of D3.js; unfortunately I didn’t manage to get readable values on the x axis). Population, GDP and trade are correlated, so figuring out what exactly drives US Congress interest in a country remains an interesting challenge.

Interest in countries is also related to the presence of natural resources: for countries without oil, the median number of times they were discussed in Congress is 331; for countries with oil it is 900.

Of course this is just an exploratory analysis. An analysis at country/year level might yield more specific conclusions. If you want to do your own analysis, download the data here (country/year) and here (country).

Method

I searched transcripts of the US Congress using the Capitol Words api of the Sunlight Foundation, using country names as search terms. Of course, this method isn’t perfect. I had to remove country names that can’t be distinguished from names of US states (Georgia, Mexico). Afterwards, I realised that I should also have removed Austria, because of confusion with a representative with that name.

Because this is just an exploratory analysis, I took a rather pragmatic approach to selecting background information on countries. For GDP, I used data from the World Bank; data on population, trade (2009) and oil reserves are from Wikipedia. For the scatterplots, I removed countries with incomplete data.

Paste0 in R is one of the things that we learned about in this week’s videos for the Data Analysis course. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I was wrong! I just learned about statistical computing’s most influential contribution of the 21st century!