O Seminário de Estudos Pós Graduados de Ciência Política "Legislative Position-Taking on Fiscal Austerity: Text Scaling from Budget Debates" foi cancelado.

Ireland's economic and financial crisis has required the passage of several increasingly austere budgets, starting in 2008, and also the legislation to create the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) to consolidate toxic bank debts.  Debates over these pieces of legislation reveals strong differences in political preferences both within parties and between parties that can be estimated by scaling the text of their legislative speeches in each debate.  Moreover, because we can assume that preferences remain stable across budgets, we can use the separate debates to validate the ability of text-scaling methodologies to recover latent positions through text.  Our analysis estimates legislator positions through quantitative text scaling of the budget debates of 2008-2010 plus the NAMA legislation, and compares these results to external expert ratings of each speech for additional validation.

Kenneth Benoit is currently Professor and Head of the Methodology Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has previously held positions at Trinity College Dublin and Central European University (Budapest). He received his Ph.D. (1998) from Harvard University, Department of Government. Substantive research interests include comparative party competition, the European Parliament, electoral systems, and transitions to democracy. Much of his recent work involves estimating the electoral effects of campaign spending. He is also a leading specialist on Hungarian elections and the Hungarian electoral system. His methodological interests include statistical methodologies for the social sciences, especially those relating to measurement and quantitative text analysis. Recent data large-scale measurement projects in which he has been involved include estimating policy positions of political parties through expert surveys, manifesto coding, and text analysis. Professor Benoit also works occasionally as a consultant for political parties, governmental organizations, and media for all business related to elections, especially computer modeling and forecasting of election outcomes.