Chris Hanretty

'parliament' Category

• Sep

  15

  2009

  Getting tables out of PDFs in Italy

  The Italian Parliament annoys me tremendously. Not for substantial reasons (though it might also annoy me for that reason), but for technical reasons.
  They have some nicely formatted XML files for the resoconti (minutes) of each parliamentary sitting.
  But their voting information is stuck in crappy PDFs.
  Grrr.
  So, I have to

  download all the PDF files using a horrible [...]

  posted in italy, parliament, rollcall by Chris

• Jun

  16

  2009

  Openparlamento.it

  From the same people who brought you openpolis, openparlamento.it went live today.
  I’m tremendously pleased that sites like this are starting to happen in Italy. The Camera actually has quite well-formated XML files for each of the plenary sessions, and all it needed was for someone to put that to good use.
  So wonderful is the site [...]

  posted in italy, parliament by Chris

• Apr

  12

  2009

  Italian deputies’ ideal points

  In previous posts I’ve tried to explain why some traditional methods for identifying legislators’ ideal points, such as optimal classification, don’t work in the Italian parliament. (A legislator’s ideal point is the point in some political space, such as the one-dimensional left-right political space, which they would prefer to any other point in that space).

  Given [...]

  posted in italy, parliament by Chris

• Mar

  25

  2009

  Transparency fail

  If you read Italian newspapers, you’ll have seen lists of the wealthiest parliamentarians, based on their tax records for 2007.
  I wondered where this information was coming from, so I checked on the Senate web site.
  Apparently, disclosure like this has been required since 1982 — legge del 5 luglio 1982, n. 441, if you’re interested. All [...]

  posted in italy, parliament by Chris

• Mar

  04

  2009

  Abstentions in the Italian parliament

  I’ve recently been investigating whethether high rates of abstentions and missing data cause problems for roll-call analysis of the Italian parliament. Here are some figures for the 14th Camera. Of the 1,141,673 possible votes (1657 rollcalls with 689 individuals):

  23.5% were votes in favour
  51.6% were votes against
  1.8% were registered abstentions
  23.1% were absent — that is, that [...]

  posted in academic, italy, parliament, voting by Chris

• Feb

  27

  2009

  The Lazy Eighty

  Recently, I’ve been experiment with the (automated) analysis of parliamentary speeches using Wordfish and Wordscores. I’ve been analysing Italian parliamentary speeches, and downloaded the XML records of plenary sessions in the Camera dei Deputati (go structured data!).
  One of the things I learned from parsing the data was that only about five hundred of the six [...]

  posted in italy, parliament, wordfish, wordscores by Chris