PSCI 2701 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Environmental Policy, Content Analysis, Due Date
30 Nov 2015
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PSCI 2701A – Assignment 3 – November 13, 2015
Content Analysi s: Speeches fro m the Thro ne
D u e D a t e
Assignments are on December 7th, 2015. Please submit your assignment on-line, through cuLearn, no later than
11:00 p.m. Upload your assignment file (as a pdf file) using the link provided on that page. Late assignments will
not be accepted without proper medical documentation of illness.
O b j e c t i v e
In this assignment, you will conduct content analysis of Speeches from the Throne to examine whether and/or
how attention to environmental policy issues by governments in Canada has changed over time.
B a c k g r o u n d
In Canada, governments introduce their legislative agendas in a Speech from the Throne that opens each session
of the legislature. “Speeches from the throne provide one of the best indicators of policy attention by
governments… they are aimed at announcing the legislative priorities of governments… and they are they are
highly correlated with the government bills introduced in a session.” (Montpetit and Foucault 2012, 644) In your
project, you will conduct a content analysis of five Throne Speeches of the federal government to track how
environmental policy issues have risen or fallen on the agenda and how attention to specific environmental issues
has shifted over time.
The Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) is an international research project that examines the changing issue
priorities of governments by analyzing the content of a wide variety of texts, such as debates, speeches, media
coverage. Studies conducted under the CAP in different countries have traced the attention of government to
different policy topics over time, showing how issues such as the economy, international affairs, crime and
immigration have risen and fallen on the agenda. An important methodological contribution of this project is the
development of a valid and reliable list of topic codes that are comparable over time and across nations. A list of
the subtopics for environmental issues from the CAP is found in Table 1 below.
I n s t r u c t i o n s :
The environmental subtopics (the codes) listed in Table 1 will form the basis of your content analysis – that is, you
will analyze speeches and record the frequency with which each variable is mentioned. The population for your
analysis is all Speeches from the Throne – the Government of Canada has 147 speeches in total, each opening a
new legislative session of Parliament. The sample you select should be five speeches given in the period between
1867 (the first legislative session of Parliament) and 2015. The text of these speeches can be found on the
PARLINFO website of the Government of Canada.
Briefly, the content analysis process of the three Speeches involves reading each text and identifying the
sentences which refer to policy content (you will find that a significant proportion of the speech is not related to
specific policy issues). Each sentence referring to environmental policy content is assigned a code (i.e., coded)
using one of the 12 topic codes in Table 1. The frequency of occurrence of each code is recorded and tabulated.
The results for each Speech are analyzed and compared.
Content analysis should include these steps (see Berdahl & Archer, Chapter 12 for a detailed discussion of the
process):
1. Develop a precise and answerable research question about environmental issues on government policy
agendas. There are many possible reasons for analyzing government attention to environmental policy issues;
your question should address one main reason. For example, you may wish to track: changes over time: in
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response to specific events or circumstances (e.g., international treaty negotiations, such as the Kyoto
Protocol or the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora [CITES]);
resulting from a change in governing party (e.g., from Liberal to Conservative, or from minority to majority
status); related to specific issues (e.g., climate change, coastal water protection, hazardous waste disposal).
2. Briefly review 2-3 scholarly publications (textbooks, academic books or articles) that are related to your
research question and discuss how they inform your analysis (e.g., differences in policy priorities between
political parties; the effects of recessions or crises on government priorities; the impact of minority versus
majority status of the party in government; the impact of public opinion about global warming).
3. Identify the sample for your analysis (i.e., the five Speeches) and provide a rationale for choosing these five
and briefly discuss your project’s methodology.
4. Code your selected documents
Create a coding form that allows you to manually record the frequency with which each
environmental policy topic is mentioned in each Speech (see sample below). This coding form will be
used to collect the data for your analysis, and should be included in an appendix with your paper.
Your study should count the number of sentences/sentence fragments referring to each policy topic
out of the total number of sentences in the Speech.
In addition to raw frequencies of sentences in each of the 12 categories, you should also report their
proportion of all sentences in the speech (i.e., as a percentage of all sentences) to account for
Speeches that are of different lengths.
Sample Coding Form
Speech 1
Speech 2
Speech 3
Speech 4
Speech 5
Code 1 frequency
2
3
Code 2 frequency
0
1
Code 3 frequency
3
0
Code 4 frequency
1
5
Code 5 frequency
0
6
Code 6 frequency
5
2
Code 7 frequency
6
2
Code 8 frequency
2
0
Code 9 frequency
0
3
Code 10 frequency
0
1
Code 11 frequency
1
4
Code 12 frequency
0
2
Enviro sentences in
speech
20
29
All sentences in speech
140
225
% of sentences in speech
devoted to enviro issues
20/140 =
14.3%
29/225 =
12.8%
5. Analyze and report your findings, including a summary of your data (such as a chart, table or word cloud), and
analysis and discussion of the results. What policy areas are most frequently discussed in each Speech? How
does this change between the three Speeches? What factors might account for or explain these changes?
6. Based on your content analysis, draw conclusions regarding your research question. What have you learned
from the comparative analysis of the Speeches? Is it consistent with what you expected to find? Why/how (or
not)? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using this type of analysis? What questions or issues for
future research arise from your analysis?
