Abstract
Legislative debates are understudied in political science. Modern tools for analyzing speech content has, fortunately, given us an opportunity to make inferences based on an ever increasing accessibility of vast corpora of texts that has only been analyzed in parts before. This thesis covers Norwegian parliamentary debates with the overarching theme of using speech to assess the effects of institutional and external shocks on MP behavior. The thesis has three main contributions. First, it provides a large corpus of automatically annotated Norwegian parliamentary debates – both the first openly accessible structured data on parliamentary debates in Norway and the first open access linguistically annotated parliamentary speech data in the world. Second, the thesis shows how contextual knowledge and data pre-processing is invaluable for subsequent analyses. Finally, the thesis gives two examples of inferential analyses on MP behavior based on parliamentary debates: these analyses show that changing electoral systems alters the vote-seeking incentives of MPs and that disproportional external shocks alter the behavior of MPs based on their constituency, rather than party affiliation.
List of papers
Paper 1 (Chapter 2): Parliamentary Debates in the Norwegian Parliament. Martin Søyland and Bjørn Høyland. Publication status: Forthcoming in the book The Politics of Legislative Debate Around the World. Final draft submitted to editor. To be published. The paper is not available in DUO awaiting publishing. |
Paper 2 (Chapter 3): Talk of Norway: An Open Resource for the Computational Social Sciences. Emanuele Lapponi, Martin Søyland, Erik Velldal, and Stephan Oepen. Publication status: Published in Language Resources and Evaluation, 52, 2018. DOI: 10.1007/s10579-018-9411-5. The article is included in the thesis. Also available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-018-9411-5 |
Paper 3 (Chapter 4): Multi-party Classification of Parliamentary Debates. Martin Søyland. Publication status: Not submitted. To be published. The paper is not available in DUO awaiting publishing. |
Paper 4 (Chapter 5): Electoral Reform and Parliamentary Debates. Bjørn Høyland and Martin Søyland. Publication status: Published in Legislative Studies Quarterly, 44, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12237. The article is included in the thesis. Also available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12237 |
Paper 5 (Chapter 6): Climate Politics in Hard Times: How Local Economic Shocks Influence MPs Attention to Climate Change. Henning Finseraas, Bjørn Høyland, and Martin Søyland. Publication status: Published in European Journal of Political Research, 2020. DOI: 10.1111/1475-6765.12415. The article is included in the thesis. Also available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12415 |