13:15 - 15:30
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Stefanie Bailer
Discussant/s:
Sven-Oliver Proksch
Meeting Room H

Martijn Schoonvelde, Clint Claessen, Denise Traber
Dynamic Responsiveness in Political Rhetoric

Miguel Pereira, Patrik Öhberg
The Expertise Curse: How Policy Expertise Can Hinder Responsiveness

Oliver Rittmann, Dominic Nyhuis, Tobias Ringwald
The plenary attention deficit disorder: Do legislators pay less attention to their female colleagues?

Stefanie Bailer, Christian Breunig, Daniel Höhmann
The Gendered Assessment of Public Opinion
Dynamic Responsiveness in Political Rhetoric
Martijn Schoonvelde 1, Clint Claessen 2, Denise Traber 2
1 UCD Dublin
2 University of Basel

According to the Thermostatic model of representation, the government updates its policies in response to the public, and in return, the public updates its preferences in response to government policy. We seek to expand the applicability of this model to the analysis of political rhetoric. First, we propose to analyze rhetorical responsiveness regarding the attention to specific issues, such as immigration and environment. Second, in addition to issue attention, we also analyze ideological placement in speeches as a means of responsiveness. To this end, we develop a manifesto-based dictionary with a guided word embeddings approach to ideologically separate MPs’ speeches. In addition, we use a perceptual measure of public opinion using weekly opinion polls that report the public's party preferences. Third, we combine public opinion, speech and electoral data to evaluate the dynamic responsiveness between MPs and the public. In sum, the goal is to expand the relevance of the Thermostatic Model as a theory of democratic responsiveness.