I'm now in the "Politics and the Web" session at Web Science 2016, and we're starting with a paper by Pablo Loyola, whose focus is on politics in Chile. This work is interested in the collective decision-making processes involved in constructing new legislation, and builds on the voting behaviours of MPs and on drafts-in-progress of new bills. Are these processes influenced by the funding that MPs receive from corporate interests?
The project took a Web-centric approach to this: it identified Web content reflecting different ideological positions on a range of legislative issues, and using these corpora assessed the similarity of new bills to these datasets. Such assessments were also compared to human-coder assessments.
This was finally correlated with the information available about the industry funding that politicians received, and some correlations between funding received and the likelihood of a bill being adopted were detected. But a greater consideration of temporal patterns also need to be considered.
