A Text Analysis of British Welfare Debates

This white paper details the process of conducting a textual analysis of three British parliamentary debates. It also discusses the development of Tableau visualizations to display the results of the analysis, along with the creation of a GitHub repository for documentation of the procedure and code, as well as a GitHub Page for displaying the visualizations. Through text analysis, this capstone project examines the rhetoric used by British members of parliament (MP) while debating the creation of a welfare state during three specific parliamentary debates in 1944: National Health Service, Social Insurance Part 1 and 2, and Employment Policy. This project examines how MPs discussed the introduction of a welfare state in postwar Britain by exploring word frequency, lexical density and speaker participation in the debates. In past studies, historians have qualitatively assessed the origins of the welfare state, but there has been little quantitative study of these debates. This project quantitatively surveys the rhetoric of MPs during the preliminary welfare debates through categorization and analysis