Panel: Using LLMs for text analysis
Crises of housing affordability, quality and security of tenure have recently taken on increased political salience in established democracies. Existing housing scholarship identifies technical, economic, governance and ideological reasons for their persistence and severity. This research casts doubt on the capacity of parliaments to effectively deliberate on future oriented policies which adequately address these problems. Left underexamined is the capacity of parliamentarians’ representative linkages with their constituencies to bringing attention and action to housing issues despite the potential limitations of partisan loyalty and executive dominance. In this paper we therefore seek to answer the questions of 1) who talks about housing, 2) how do they talk about it? and 3) why do some parliamentarians talk about this issue more than others? We contribute to debates about representative linkage and housing policy by analysing all speeches between 2020 and 2025 on housing in Australia’s federal parliament using Large Language Model assisted Quantitative Text Analysis matched to MPs’ party, personal and constituency characteristics. We find important geographic drivers which explain attention to housing beyond partisan ideology. Our findings have implications for understanding the capacity and limitations of parliamentary speech for addressing persistent inequity in housing outcomes in Australia and other established parliaments.
