Mind the context! The role of theoretical concepts for analyzing legislative text data

Abstract

With the progressing advances in text analysis methods and the increasing accessibility of parliamentary documents, the range of available tools for legislative scholars has increased massively over the past years. While the potential for comparative studies is huge, researchers can easily overlook the pitfalls associated with analyzing these documents. Against this background, I asses which theoretical considerations need to be carefully thought through preceding any (legislative) text analysis: I show that a clear definition and conceptualization of the unit of analysis such as speech or bill can vary substantially depending on the research interest. Furthermore, I discuss how the nested structure of legislative behavior and the data generating process influence our theoretic assumptions about parliamentary behavior. Based on these concepts, I derive some recommendations for the theoretical approach to quantitative textual analyses of parliamentary documents.