Parliamentarians

LUMACSS Capstone Project: Web app displaying the voting records of parliamentarians
v1.0: http://142.93.168.218/check-your-rep

Pipeline: From Raw Parliamentary Data to Voting Behaviour Summary

1. Download Parliamentary data through swissparl

Business: Data on items of business, e.g., title, description, and unique identifier
Voting: MP voting behaviour on final votes (“Schlussabstimmungen”). How did every MP vote on each item of business?
MemberCouncil: Data on each MP, e.g., party and canton

2. Use ChatGPT to generate summaries and vote statements for each item of business

ChatGPT prompt:

Das ist ein Parlamentsgeschäft:
[InitialSituation of item of business]
Beantworte diese 2 Fragen. Verwende dabei Einfache Sprache, maximal 15 Wörter und maximal 1 Satz.
1. Welche zentrale Aussage soll ein:e Wähler:in von diesem Text mitnehmen?
2. Vervollständige diesen Satz, damit er zum Geschäft passt: '[Politiker X] stimmt für … '

3. Use ChatGPT to tag each item of business

ChatGPT prompt:

Hier ist ein Dokument mit einem Titel. Gib dem Dokument 5 bis 10 Kategorien. Jede Kategorie muss 1 bis 3 Wörter umfassen. Gib nur die Kategorien zurück:
[Title of item of business]
[InitialSituation of item of business]

4. Link items of business to Worry Barometer

Manually retrieve all worries (“Sorgen”) from the last Worry Barometer (“Sorgenbarometer”)
Use the tags from step 3 to assign items of business to all worries

Using ChatGPT, generate a summary of an MP’s voting behaviour for each worry. Here is an example prompt for a single MP and a single worry:


Verwende 1 bis 2 Sätze und Einfache Sprache, um das Abstimmungsverhalten von Ada Marra zum Thema «Neue Armut / Armut jüngerer Generationen» zusammen zu fassen. Alle Punkte habe einen Bezug zum Thema:

Stimmte gegen die Ablehnung der Mindestlohn-Initiative.
Stimmte für die Ratifikation des internationalen Arbeitsübereinkommens Nr. 189 zum Schutz von Hausangestellten.
Stimmte für die Weiterführung der internationalen Zusammenarbeit der Schweiz von 2017 bis 2020.
Stimmte gegen die stärkere Besteuerung von Kapitaleinkommen.

Scripts Documentation

00_sandbox: Tryouts
01_query_optimisation: How can ChatGPT be best queried to create sensible summaries?
02_chatgpt_summarisation: Pipeline to let ChatGPT create summaries of business descriptions
03_shiny_app: Create Shiny App which ChatGPT summarisation data
04_text2vec: Create embeddings using fasttext; Use all available information as features (details); Use hierarchical clustering
05_chatgpt_tagging: Use ChatGPT to create tags for each item of business
06_all_features: Combine all features (including chatgpt summaries and chatgpt tags) into a single embedding and then cluster
07_BERTopic: …
08_main_tag_cluster: Create hierarchical clusters within main tag groups
11_chatgpt_sorgenbarometer: Use the Worry Barometer to group items of business. Then get ChatGPT summaries of voting record based on these groups.
Futher options: Plain LDA

To Dos

NLP

[x] Setup further ChatGPT prompts that summarise a parliamentarian's voting behaviour; Summarise sets of votes, e.g. economic votes or specific policy dimensions. In short, make the items of business more accessible to users > Done: Grouped by Worry Barometer topics
[ ] Group existing topics into larger über-topics
- [x] Either use tags provided by the parliament or topics in the Worry Barometer
- [ ] Maybe place über-topics into (another) dropdown, so to only ever display one über-topic at once
- [ ] Fix faulty business item categorisations
- [ ] Look into strange worry barometer formulations
[ ] Generate data on all parliamentarians from last legislatory period to wrap up project for the end of the year

UI

Must

[x] Increase main dropdown size
[x] Replace Collapse with Modal
[ ] Find better way to display Worries Selector/Dropdown
[ ] Naming / Branding / Logo
[x] About Page

Should

[ ] Add Table of Contents to top of profile page
[ ] Apply Swiss punctuation and spelling: ß > ss, " > «, etc.

Could

[ ] Speed up switching between parliamentarians
[ ] Make site responsive
[ ] See also Issues tagged [enhancement](https://github.com/fabianaiolfi/Parliamentarians/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Aenhancement)

fabianaiolfi / Parliamentarians

readme