Studying Lobby Influence in the European Parliament
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2023
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| author | Suresh, Aswin Radojevic, Lazar Salvi, Francesco Magron, Antoine Kristof, Victor Grossglauser, Matthias |
| author_facet | Suresh, Aswin Radojevic, Lazar Salvi, Francesco Magron, Antoine Kristof, Victor Grossglauser, Matthias |
| contents | We present a method based on natural language processing (NLP), for studying the influence of interest groups (lobbies) in the law-making process in the European Parliament (EP). We collect and analyze novel datasets of lobbies' position papers and speeches made by members of the EP (MEPs). By comparing these texts on the basis of semantic similarity and entailment, we are able to discover interpretable links between MEPs and lobbies. In the absence of a ground-truth dataset of such links, we perform an indirect validation by comparing the discovered links with a dataset, which we curate, of retweet links between MEPs and lobbies, and with the publicly disclosed meetings of MEPs. Our best method achieves an AUC score of 0.77 and performs significantly better than several baselines. Moreover, an aggregate analysis of the discovered links, between groups of related lobbies and political groups of MEPs, correspond to the expectations from the ideology of the groups (e.g., center-left groups are associated with social causes). We believe that this work, which encompasses the methodology, datasets, and results, is a step towards enhancing the transparency of the intricate decision-making processes within democratic institutions. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_11381 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2023 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Studying Lobby Influence in the European Parliament Suresh, Aswin Radojevic, Lazar Salvi, Francesco Magron, Antoine Kristof, Victor Grossglauser, Matthias Computation and Language Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science Computers and Society Social and Information Networks We present a method based on natural language processing (NLP), for studying the influence of interest groups (lobbies) in the law-making process in the European Parliament (EP). We collect and analyze novel datasets of lobbies' position papers and speeches made by members of the EP (MEPs). By comparing these texts on the basis of semantic similarity and entailment, we are able to discover interpretable links between MEPs and lobbies. In the absence of a ground-truth dataset of such links, we perform an indirect validation by comparing the discovered links with a dataset, which we curate, of retweet links between MEPs and lobbies, and with the publicly disclosed meetings of MEPs. Our best method achieves an AUC score of 0.77 and performs significantly better than several baselines. Moreover, an aggregate analysis of the discovered links, between groups of related lobbies and political groups of MEPs, correspond to the expectations from the ideology of the groups (e.g., center-left groups are associated with social causes). We believe that this work, which encompasses the methodology, datasets, and results, is a step towards enhancing the transparency of the intricate decision-making processes within democratic institutions. |
| title | Studying Lobby Influence in the European Parliament |
| topic | Computation and Language Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science Computers and Society Social and Information Networks |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.11381 |