The Speech from the Throne (the Queen’s Speech)

The Speech from the Throne, the King’s or the Queen’s Speech, sets out executive and legislative priorities of British government in the forthcoming session of parliament. The full text of the speech is coded at the ‘quasi-sentence’ level (a quasi-sentence constitutes an expression of a single policy idea or issue). Transcripts of the speech were blind-coded by two researchers who compared and reconciled their responses; first to ascertain whether each quasi-sentence contained any policy content and then to assign a major topic and sub-topic code to each quasi-sentence. This procedure led to ninety per cent inter-coder reliability for major topics for most years. The coders resolved remaining differences through discussion and project leaders made the final decision in the few cases where coders could not agree.