Latin American Legislative Database: Analyzing Political Speech Across Countries (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Parties & Legislatures

Abstract

Scholars of Latin America have often turned to the legislatures in the region to understand much about the underlying politics within and across countries. Latin American legislatures have further proven to be ideal cases for the study of legislatures more broadly (especially the US) as these Presidential systems contain myriad differences in their structures, institutional rules, houses, and relationship to their executives. However, to our knowledge, there has been no systematic examination of what members talk about in these bodies and more importantly, if and how differences exist across countries. This manuscript introduces a new dataset on legislative speech in Latin America, the first readily available cross-national corpus of its kind in the region. The dataset which will be available to the public to search and analyze contains the publicly available speeches of legislatures from six countries in Latin America over various periods. This manuscript takes a first look at the topics most discussed by legislators in eight Latin American countries. Using various text-analysis techniques, we analyze the topics covered by legislators and make comparisons within countries over time and across countries. We compare these findings to others observed in similar studies outside of Latin America. Finally, we point to future research that can be conducted in comparative politics, US politics, international relations, and Latin American studies with the use of this new database.

Authors

• Sebastian Vallejo Vera, Tecnologico de Monterrey

• Jennifer L Tobin, Georgetown University