Gender-specific political agendas: a topic modeling analysis of Turkish Grand National Assembly Speeches

Abstract

The increasing participation of women in the political sphere plays an important role in shaping parliamentary debates. Today, twenty percent of the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) is made up of women MPs. However, how this increase affects the issues debated in the parliament remains unknown. Our study combines computational methods and social sciences to investigate gender dynamics in TGNA. In order to understand the diversity of topics and whether female MPs systematically differ from their male counterparts in terms of the content of their speeches, topic modelling is employed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and the topics addressed by female and male MPs are analyzed comparatively. The findings show that female MPs systematically participate more frequently in debates on women-centred issues such as family, domestic violence and femicide, while their participation in debates on other issues such as law, health, employment and agriculture is in line with their male counterparts.