Countries mentioned in parliament

November 22nd, 2006 § 0 comments

Since [My Society](http://www.mysociety.org/) have made data on what’s happening in parliament so easily available, I figured somebody should poke at it. [Here](http://ohuiginn.net/docs/parliamentmentions.csv) is a first shot: a table of how often each of the world’s developing countries has been mentioned in Commons and Lords debates. The plan now is to look at what gets a country mentioned in parliament – i.e. (very roughly) what foreign policy issues MPs and Lords care about. So far I’ve only looked at the GDP of the countries, which doesn’t make a great deal of difference (R²=0.45), but I’m currently trying to find data for trade with the UK, human rights, and so on. The one surprise so far is how closely the number of mentions in the Lords and in the Commons match each other (R²=0.97) – I’d expected them to get excited about different topics. The lords cared more about Burma, and less about Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, but not greatly.
Anyway, I’ll keep on tinkering with this for a while, and see what else I can find.

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