Figure XXX shows the evolution of the Fiscal Conservatism Index (y-axis) from 1970 to 2015 in 7 Canadian provinces. The results highlight a higher degree of fiscal conservatism expressed in the speeches of heads of government from 1985 to 1995 (greyed area). However, the provinces of Ontario and Quebec seem to follow different patterns. Each point in Figure XXX represents the Fiscal Conservatism Index--"Wordscores" (Laver et al. 2003)-- based on the analysis of speeches delivered in provincial legislative assemblies of Canada. Wordscores is a method of supervised automated content analysis that assigns scores to documents on the basis of word counts and reference document scores. In order to measure the degree of fiscal ideology that heads of government express in their speeches we compare throne speeches (virgin texts) to the speeches of health, education and budget ministers (reference texts). A non-parametric local regression (lowess) is used to illustrate the trend.
