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International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation

SBP-BRiMS 2019: Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling pp 50–59Cite as

A Quantitative Portrait of Legislative Change in Ukraine

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11549))

Abstract

Over the past decade, Ukraine has undergone tremendous socio-political changes, which continue to this day. While such changes may be analyzed and interpreted from a variety of sources, we utilize recent advancements in the quantitative analysis of culture to identify how these changes are encoded within Ukraine’s legislation. Our goal is to provide a new picture of Ukrainian governance that may be used by subject matter experts as a complement to existing forms of political data. To do so, we apply probabilistic topic modeling to compress over a decade of Ukrainian legislation into patterns of word usage. We then apply a recently developed calculation of novelty to measure how different each draft law is from the draft laws which precede it. We find an interesting pattern of legislative changes and identify some of the drivers of these changes. Finally, we discuss the relationship between our results and the broader context of Ukrainian political changes and suggest steps to explore this relationship further.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://rada.gov.ua.

  2. 2.

    https://voxukraine.org.

  3. 3.

    We thank Dr. Tymofiy Mylovanov for pointing this out to us.

  4. 4.

    For an example of how this was reported in American media, see https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/11/25/247184300/ukraine-protests-continue-over-suspension-of-eu-talks.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Dr. Tymofiy Mylovanov for explaining the political context of certain bills and for the supplemental draft law data provided by him and his team at VoxUkraine. This research is funded in part by the U.S. Office of Naval Research (N00014-17-1-2675) and the Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Endowment at University of Arkansas – Little Rock. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding organizations. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR, 72204, USA

    Zachary K. Stine & Nitin Agarwal

Authors
  1. Zachary K. Stine
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  2. Nitin Agarwal
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zachary K. Stine .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, USA

    Robert Thomson

  2. University of Michigan–Flint, Flint, MI, USA

    Halil Bisgin

  3. Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA

    Christopher Dancy

  4. The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Ayaz Hyder

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Stine, Z.K., Agarwal, N. (2019). A Quantitative Portrait of Legislative Change in Ukraine. In: Thomson, R., Bisgin, H., Dancy, C., Hyder, A. (eds) Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling. SBP-BRiMS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11549. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21741-9_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21741-9_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-21740-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-21741-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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