Data science can tell us which political party is dominating

Young scientists from the University of Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington have come up with a novel way to figure out which party or parties in New Zealand's Parliament are dominating any particular political debate or discourse. Young scientists from the University of Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington have come up with a novel way to figure out which party or parties in New Zealand's Parliament are dominating any particular political debate or discourse. Te Pūnaha Matatini Whanau members Ben Curran and Demival Vasques Filho (University of Auckland), and Kyle Higham and Elisenda Ortiz (Victoria University of Wellington) collaborated on the project, and their research findings have just been published in PLoS ONE, a leading international scientific journal. Their paper, 'Look who's talking: Two-mode networks as representations of a topic model of New Zealand Parliamentary speeches,' shows how the popularity of different topics debated in Parliament change over time, and proposes an approach that can reveal which party or parties are dominating the debate within certain topics. "It is difficult for any society to simply and easily track political debate and discussion over time," says co-author Demival Vasques Filho.