Ottawa's lobbying issue-landscape in February
Ottawa's lobbying issue-landscape in February
issues on the rise: "Marine Transportation and Ports”, “Arctic Policy and Climate Change”, “Biomass and Biofuels”, and “Infrastructure, Telecommunications and Transportation”
Today’s edition of Queen Street Analytics focuses on the issue-sets that stood out in February’s lobbying communications.
The CliffsNotes version:
the issue of “Climate Change and Environmental Protection” (Issue# 297) reigns supreme in lobby communications in February, as it has for every month over the last two years
Other core issues in February relate to “Food Exports” (Issue# 57), “Defense Procurement and Space Cooperation” (Issue# 138), and “Mining and Environmental Impact” (Issue# 25)
Issues that rose the most in prominence revolved around “Arctic Policy and Climate Change” (Issue# 52), “Biomass and Biofuels” (Issue# 109), “Marine Transportation and Ports” (Issue# 142), and “Infrastructure, Telecommunications and Transportation” (Issue# 198)
Declining issues included “Dangerous Goods Regulations and Trade” (Issue# 49) and “Financial Reporting Standards” (Issue# 34).
Several of the rising issues can be clearly traced to increased lobbying from specific sectors or increased lobbying of specific government institutions (see below for details)
Technical Preamble:
Issues are created by letting AI extract key-phrases from text descriptions of lobby-communications (monthly by sector and by institution), and then using factor analysis to combine key-phrases into issue-clusters based on which key-phrases ebb and flow together at the sector- or institution-level over time.
For a summary of how this is done, see this post:
1. The most salient lobbying-issues in February
We define an issue’s salience by the number of sectors (out of 150) and the number of government institutions (out of 160) for which a phrase contained in an issue was identified as a key-phrase by LobbyIQ’s algorithms.
Exhibit 1 lists the 25 most salient lobbying-issues in February, where N_ denotes the number of sectors and institutions for which an issue was salient, Issue# is LobbyIQ’s issue-ID (specific to the month of February), and an issue itself is a collection of key-phrases determined by factor-analysis.
Exhibit 1 contains the most salient issues in February, but what about their momentum? Some of the issues are rising in importance, while others are declining.
2. Rising and declining lobbying-issues in February
To determine which issues are on the rise and which are on the decline, we take the 300+ issue-sets provided by LobbyIQ and fan them out into a monthly data-frame of that includes one monthly count of N_ for each issue (including zero-counts), run a prediction model on these counts, and look for the issue-sets with the biggest positive and negative deviations (=Excess) from our prediction.
Exhibit 2 lists the top-25 rising issue-sets in February (as defined by “Excess”). With a bit of squinting, we can see that the biggest rising issues in Exhibit 2 (issue# 52 and issue#25) the 4th and 5th most salient issue in Exhibit 1.
It is equally instructive to ask which issues are falling in salience, and Exhibit 3 answers that question, where Excess<0 indicates a negative trend-break in salience relative to the previous twelve months. A drop in salience could have its origins in specific sectors becoming less focused on an issue, or in certain institutions no longer getting lobbied on an issue.
3. Which sectors drove changes in February
For the issues that are on the rise (Exhibit 2), we want to know the source of where the momentum behind these issues is coming from.
To get at this, we look at the sectors that most account for issues’ rise in salience. To do this, we fan the data out by issue x sector x month, and predict how likely a sector was to lobby on an issue in February. We then flag sectors that lobbied on an issue in February but had not been predicted to do so, based on the previous twelve months that it had not been likely to lobby on over the previous twelve months.
In Exhibit 4, the first 2 columns denote the issue and the last column lists the sectors that are lobbying on said issue now but haven’t done so consistently over the previous twelve months. The numbers in brackets in the last column are 1 minus the expected likelihood of a sector lobbying on an issue. For example, the electric equipment sector lobbied on “Arctic Policy and Climate Change” (issue#52) in February, but the prevalence of it doing so over the last twelve months was only 11% (i.e. 0.89 = 1 - 0.11).
LobbyIQ subscribers can also directly trace the emergence of an issue on each sector dashboard. For example, Exhibit 5 shows the emergence of issue #62 (=Copyright Modernization Act, Government Advertising Placement, Local Journalism Initiative, Online News Act) in the Telecoms sector in February.
4. Which institutions drove changes in February
We can perform essentially the same exercise at the issue-institution level, which amounts to asking which (if any) institutions were newly lobbied on an emerging issue in February. This is done in Exhibit 6. For example, StatCan and CIRNAC got lobbied on keywords in the “Arctic Policy and Climate Change” issue-set in February, but there was atypical, i.e. there was only a less than 15% likelihood of this happening based on the previous twelve months of data (i.e. 0.87 = 1 - 0.13).
For LobbyIQ subscribers, the emergence of an issue in an institution can again be directly traced on each institution dashboard. For example, Exhibit 7 shows the emergence of issue #25 (“Mineral Exploration Industry”) in the Intergovernmental Affairs Secretariat (IGA) dashboard in February.
This concludes today’s edition. By next week, the March data should be fully posted, so we will dive into that.