The impact of external events on the Swiss parliamentary issue agenda

In a functioning democracy, it is crucial that the political sphere reacts to changes in societal prerequisites. Our analysis explores the impact of external events like the global financial crisis in 2008 on the Swiss parliamentary issue agenda. We analyze the verbatim transcripts of parliamentary debates and the issue orientation of parliamentary business from 1999 until 2018 by means of machine learning text analysis and other quantitative and qualitative methods to track the salient issues over time. The salience of the issues then gets compared to real world events to uncover correlations of the issue agenda and external events.