The Professor Will See You Now: The joy of data
Illustration: Tracy Worrall
4 min read
In an occasional series, Professor Philip Cowley offers a political science lesson for The House’s readers. Here: the joy of data
Digitisation has facilitated a mini explosion of research
Many years ago, as a postgraduate student, my friend Dave had the idea of looking at backbench rebellions in what are now called public bill committees, but were then known as standing committees.
All the information he needed was public, in that it was printed and available, at least in major libraries. But none of it was online or searchable in any meaningful way. So he sat in the university’s parliamentary papers room in silence, turning page after page, looking for the divisions. Periodically, he’d stop and quickly scan the list of names in a vote. Usually, everyone had voted the same way. But every now and again, someone had broken ranks: he’d say “got one”; I would smile, in a way I hoped was encouraging; and he’d go back to turning the pages in silence. Very occasionally, maybe once or twice a day, he’d find a rebellion where the government were defeated, and we’d head off to the library café for a coffee or a doughnut to celebrate.
In total, over that summer, Dave looked at the 5,306 standing committee divisions between 1979 and 1992. He found a total of 684 dissenting votes by Conservative MPs, spread across 103 bills, inflicting 56 defeats.
For some strange reason, he decided that this wasn’t the way he wanted to spend the rest of his life and, after graduating, he went to get a proper job.
I didn’t – and I was reminded of Dave recently when reading a new piece of research examining the representation of women from “minoritised groups”, a phrase deliberately designed to include religion as well as skin colour.
The finding was interesting in itself: minoritised female MPs were almost seven times more likely to discuss the issues of minoritised women than white male MPs. Plus, when they did so, they were more likely to raise a much broader set of concerns. It was another example of the extent to which the identity of MPs affects what they raise in the chamber.
Of just as much interest was the process: this new paper drew on a dataset of 1.1m speeches, all downloadable at a click of a button or two. This enables analysis on a scale – and with an ease – that would have been unimaginable to those of us sat turning the pages of Hansard, day after day.
The digitisation of parliamentary records has facilitated a mini explosion of research like this, examining those aspects of parliamentary behaviour where a lot of the action takes place – things like questions or speeches – but where the logistics of large-scale research were previously prohibitive.
It still takes work to get the data in a usable form (as anyone who has done it will tell you, the reality is never just a click of a button or two), and human intervention is often still required. Having found some 37,729 sentences containing possible mentions of minoritised women, the researcher then examined each one herself to see if they were genuine and should be included in her analysis, or spurious and needed rejecting. (Yes, you read that right: 37,729). But the growth of AI should make even this aspect easier, reducing the costs of research yet further.
It’s not all positive. Very occasionally, this relative ease produces work that misses something obvious, something that would have been clear to anyone who had spent time turning the pages, but for the most part, all the time we used to spend just gathering the information can be better spent analysing it. That’s worth a doughnut or two.
Your further reading for this week: O Siow, ‘Needles in a haystack: an intersectional analysis of the descriptive, constitutive and substantive representation of minoritised women’, European Journal of Politics and Gender (2023)
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