Public broadcasters are bound by strict guidelines to ensure balance in representing different demographic and political groups, and to better reflect the distribution of these characteristics within the public and political elites. How are these decisions affected when the biggest political issues of the day create further cleavages that not only cross-cut existing divides but also deserve representation in political discourse? In this article, we examine how panel selection on BBC Question Time dealt with this in relation to two prominent issues in twenty-first century UK politics: Brexit and the UK invasion of Iraq. We introduce an original dataset including all BBC Question Time appearances between 2001 and 2019, created using a combination of web-scraping and expert coding. This allows us to trace patterns in representation across sex, ethnicity, educational background, as well as partisan affiliation and stances on issues like Brexit and the Iraq war among the show’s panelists. We find that panel selection closely reflects gender and ethnic diversity among the UK public and MPs, but that individuals from privileged educational backgrounds are vastly overrepresented on the show. For both the Iraq war and Brexit, the show again broadly reflects the views of the public and political elites once we account for relevant comparisons between politicians and non-political guests.

中文翻译：

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BBC 的英国脱欧和伊拉克战争提问时间：英国公众参与广播中的人口和政治问题表示


公共广播公司受到严格指导方针的约束，以确保在代表不同人口和政治群体方面的平衡，并更好地反映这些特征在公众和政治精英中的分布。当当今最大的政治问题造成进一步的分裂，不仅跨越了现有的分歧，而且应该在政治话语中得到代表时，这些决定会受到怎样的影响？在本文中，我们研究了 BBC Question Time 的小组选择如何处理与 21 世纪英国政治中的两个突出问题相关的问题：英国脱欧和英国入侵伊拉克。我们介绍了一个原始数据集，包括 2001 年至 2019 年间所有 BBC Question Time 的出现，该数据集是使用网络抓取和专家编码相结合创建的。这使我们能够追踪节目小组成员在性别、种族、教育背景以及党派归属和对英国脱欧和伊拉克战争等问题上的立场。我们发现，小组选择密切反映了英国公众和议员的性别和种族多样性，但来自特权教育背景的个人在节目中的比例大大过高。对于伊拉克战争和英国脱欧，一旦我们考虑到政治家和非政治嘉宾之间的相关比较，该节目再次广泛地反映了公众和政治精英的观点。