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Category: Data

Description: This is a researcher-generated observational pre-analysis plan which presents the data collection procedure and several hypotheses I will test on South African parliamentary data. By researcher-generated, I mean that I am collecting the data, and pre-registering how I will go about collecting and cleaning the data, and which variables I will be collecting (Burlig 2018). Specifically, I am interested in predicting floor time allocation; how much time each politician spends talking during parliamentary debates. The data, which is currently in the early stages of collection, will cover the years 1999 through to 2023 and will contain information on parliamentary speakers and their characteristics (such as age, gender, and level of education), as well as details on the parties they represent. The unit of analysis will be the statements given by individual politicians. This data will allow for quantitative methods like computational text analysis and qualitative methods like discourse analysis. This pre-analysis plan provides some motivation behind the creation of the data, a detailed description of the data collection procedure, a brief discussion of theory and my core hypothesis, as well as a discussion of potential future usage of the data.