README

"Parliamentary speech and media attention in Estonia, 2011-2019"

Authors:

Martin Mölder, Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu 
(martin.molder@ut.ee)

Tatiana Lupacheva, Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of 
Tartu (tatiana.lupacheva@ut.ee) 

This data set includes the data that was used for the models that are reported 
in the paper "A Place to Speak and be Heard? Parliamentary Speech and Media 
Attention in Estonia, 2011-2019" that is set to be published in the journal 
Legislative Studies Quarterly. It includes daily data on MP, what they said in 
parliament and how much media attention they received. For more information 
about the data and the analyses, please contact the authors of the paper/data 
set. 

Research for collecting this data has been carried out with the support of the 
Young Estonia Research Grant from the Postimees Foundation.

Overview of data files:

data_12_daily_input.csv - Data for the 12th composition of the Estonian 
parliament (2011-2015)
data_13_daily_input.csv - Data for the 13th composition of the Estonian 
parliament (2015-2019)

Both data files are structured so that each row is a day per member of 
parliament during the whole parliamentary term. Different subsets of this data 
are used for the analyses in the above mentioned paper. Both data files contain 
the following variables:

name 			The name of the member of parliament. 
id 				ID for the member of parliament (combination of first letter of 
				first name, last name and date of birth)
id2				Version of id that also considers the separate parliamentary 
				spells of some members of parliament.
party 			The parliamentary group (party) of the MP.
seq				The daily sequence for the parliamentary term.
date 			The date.
count_media		Count of media mentions of MP during the day. The number of 
				articles in the media data set that mention the MP during that 
				day. Media count variables with the suffixes _lead* and _lag* 
				indicate the respective leads or lags of this variable.
rel_count_media	Relative count of media mentions. This is the count of media 
				mentions divided by the number of articles in the media data set 
				for that particular day.
speaking		Whether the MP spoke in parliament during that day. See the 
				mentioned article for more details. 
total_words		The total number of words said in parliament (in thousands).
flesch_score	Flesch reading ease score. See the mentioned article for more 
				details. 
prop_self		The percentage of words said that refer to the self (pronouns
				and verbs).
prop_we			Proportion of words said that refer to "we" (pronouns and 
				verbs).
prop_neg		Proportion of negative words said.
comch_flead		A variable that indicates if the person was a committee chair 
				(yes.no) or a party group leader (no.yes) or both (yes.yes) or
				neither (no.no).
coalition		If the MP comes from a party that was in government. 
mp_parls		The number of parliaments that the MP has been a member of for
				more than 30 days (including the parliament in question).
govexp			If the MP has government experience. 
gender			The gender of the MP.
age 			The age of the MP.
partyexp_years	The number of years the MP has been a party member.