Mapping political discourse: An application of network visualization to textual records of legislative deliberations Norbert Kwan Nok Chan Azadeh Nematzadeh Karissa McKelvey School of Public and Environmental Affairs School of Informatics and Computing, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University Indiana University Indiana University Email:
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[email protected] Abstract—In political science, one strand of research on agenda To tease out the mechanisms of agenda setting, much of the setting concerns the politics of choosing and defining problems research falls on the strategies and calculations of actors who for policy action. While theory deals with both strategies for engage in the contest (Cobb and Elder 1972; Rochefort and agenda control at the individual level and the dynamic of agenda change at the aggregate level, existing quantitative analysis Cobb 1994), the cognitive and informational basis of agenda remains confined to the latter. This deficiency prevents scholars change (Jones 2001), the general institutional environment from testing empirical observations about the micro-macro link regulating agenda formation and revision (Kingdon 1984; between behaviors and outcomes. With a view to closing this Jones and Baumgartner 1993; Workman, Jones, and Jochim analytical gap, this paper describes our application of network 2009), and the broad patterns of agenda change (Downs 1972; visualization as a first step to realizing the aggregate structure of local interactions between participants of in the legislative Baumgartner and Jones 2003). However, existing research has process. It concludes with some preliminary outputs generated yet to take a systematic look at the micro-macro link between from a dataset of published chamber deliberations in the French the disparate actions pursued by individual actors and the national legislature .