The buzzwords “Machine Learning”, “Neural Networks” and “Artifical Intelligence” hover through the air wherever people are working with large sets of data, also called Big Data. Such approaches are already in use for friendship recommendations on Facebook, for improving the quality of your smartphone pictures or for reducing waste by regulating product orders of supermarkets. They improve predictions wherever there is enough data to “learn” from. But this trend just starts to be relevant for…

The code used for this paper was written with the help of the tutorial held by Marcel Neunhoeffer (provided by the chair of Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences) to support the lecture Advanced Quantitative Methods, as well as with the provided R code by (Lantz 2015; Cook 2017; Dr. Wiley 2016).

The purpose of this data essay is to examine whether different electoral regimes affect the participation of members of parliament (MP) in parliamentary debates. The task was to empirically test two hypotheses that claim opposing effects of ideological distance on the number of speeches delivered by MPs in proportional and majoritarian systems.