Conference Agenda

Parliamentary debates and parliamentary discourse are an integral part of a nation's political power because parliaments, as representative institutions, are responsible for shaping the legislation that affects people's daily lives. Thus, parliaments are a source of power for Members of Parliament (MPs) and other politicians (Bischof and Ilie 2018). Parliamentary discourse is at the heart of political decision-making and is an expression of political power – an important and widely theorized concept especially in cultural and social studies (Simon 1952; Parsons 1963). Parliamentary debates are therefore an important source of highly relevant data not only for the social sciences and humanities, but also for computer science, making parliamentary discourse interesting for both qualitative (van Dijk 2000; Bayley 2004; Ilie 2015) and quantitative (Abercrombie and Batista-Navarro 2020; Rheault et al. 2016; Cherepnalkoski and Mozetič 2016) and multidisciplinary research (Andrushchenko et al. 2022; Blaxill 2013).

We analyzed gender representation and power relations in the national parliaments of three European countries – Spain, Slovenia and the United Kingdom. The aim of the work was twofold: first, we analyzed the differences in the political representation of women in national parliaments and examined different manifestations of power within parliamentary discourse through the analysis of parliamentary speeches. With our analysis, we wanted to examine the differences in women's political representation and show that high political representation alone does not necessarily warrant the actual power of women MPs in the respective parliaments. Our second, equally important goal was to show that the intertwining of data science and social science research can generate meaningful results that might otherwise be overlooked.

To gain insight into the distribution of power of parliamentarians in the different national parliaments in Europe, we used one of the most comprehensive parliamentary datasets available – the ParlaMint dataset (Erjavec et al. 2023). This dataset contains session transcripts from more than 20 European national parliaments and spans several legislative periods with transcripts of speeches made between 2009 and 2022 (depending on the country). The corpora are uniformly encoded, linguistically annotated using the Universal Dependencies Standard and contain extensive and informative metadata of more than 11 thousand speakers. In addition, the named entities are annotated, which was very important for our analysis.

We analyzed the lower houses of the national parliaments of three European countries: the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, the Congreso de los Diputados in Spain and the Državni zbor in Slovenia. We analyzed the last completed parliamentary term (UK 2017 – 2019, Spain 2016 – 2019, Slovenia 2014 – 2018) in order to have a fully balanced group of parliamentarians. We were interested in three things in particular: first, we examined the overall gender representation in all three parliaments so that we could analyze the proportion of female MPs in national parliaments. Secondly, we analyzed the argumentative power of MPs and focused our analysis on how MPs' speeches and mentions of MPs can shed light on the power of MPs in political debates. We inspected how argumentative power becomes visible through parliamentary discourse and how the speeches and mentions shape the power relations in parliament. Last but not least, we focused on the structural power of MPs within the respective parliaments. We were interested in how the speaking practices of male and female MPs relate to certain topics and the distribution of power. We approached this question by referring to the division of topics within parliamentary debates into 'hard' topics (i.e. topics that are more likely to be discussed by male MPs) and 'soft' topics (i.e. topics that are more likely to be discussed by female MPs) (Baeck et al. 2014). We focused on five key policy issues, namely energy, finance ('hard' topics), education, healthcare ('soft' topics) and immigration, which we treated as an ambiguous topic. In doing so, we wanted to investigate whether this pattern of division could be observed in selected parliaments. To better understand and visualize the power relations between MPs, we created directed networks in which the nodes represented the mutual mentions of MPs and the weights were the number of mentions. For each parliament, we created both general and topic-specific networks, which helped us to better understand the speech dynamics on a particular topic.

Our results show that the political representation of women in all three national parliaments is quite high (between 32% and 41%), but still below the expected and desired level (50%). This suggests that although the implementation of gender quotas has been rather successful, political participation still remains highly gendered and there is still room for improvement. Furthermore, we found that despite the relatively high level of political representation, women still have much less power of argumentation than men. In all three parliaments, the active and passive importance of women was lower than their share of political representation, with Spain showing particularly negative values. This shows that although the Spanish parliament has the highest proportion of female MPs, we were able to prove that the mere presence of female MPs in parliament does not justify their participation in debates. Although they hold the same position, female MPs have fewer opportunities to express their opinions.

We also show that the dichotomy between 'hard' and 'soft' topics is not universal, but depends largely on the political and cultural context of the parliament under study. The fact is that structural power in parliaments varies thematically and that even on issues that are generally considered 'soft', women do not necessarily have more say than men. Our networks have visualized the distribution of speeches and mentions of male and female MPs well, showing that despite the presence of some prominent female politicians, men often still dominate parliamentary discourse. This visualization, combined with statistical and social network analysis suggests that the gender of MPs may have a significant impact on their argumentative and structural power.

Although many of the findings collected in our study deserve further analysis and explanation, we have scratched the surface of an important social issue of gender inequalities in politics and, most importantly, shown that multidisciplinary research can provide meaningful results and uncover constructions that serve as harmful blockages to the realization of gender equality in politics.

Keywords: parliamentary discourse, network analysis, argumentative power, structural power, relevance

Proposal for a short paper (10-minute) at DiPaDa 2024, DHNB 2024

During the 16th century the Imperial Diets, or Reichstage, of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation were convened by the emperors of the House of Austria at intervals of one or more years in changing locations. They were events in which the head of the empire called the aristocratic and urban estates to him to discuss and decide on political topics and thus the fate of Central Europe. Therefore Imperial Diets were proto-parliamentary legislative assemblies and can be seen as the forerunners of modern parliaments and an important part of the constitutional history of the Empire. The subjects of deliberation are diverse and touch on such different and central areas of social coexistence, such as, in modern terms, questions of internal security, the judicial system, taxes, defense against external danger, monetary policy and the shaping of social coexistence in the face of confessional plurality, to name just the most important.

Imperial Diet research is primarily based on the edition series of the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, in which records for each individual Diet have been collected and published in print since the 19th century. While this enterprise is still going on, the Commission has begun the retro-digitisation of existing volumes. However, without technical tools and the resulting search options as well as maintaining the often hermetic, source-oriented terminology, it is almost impossible to gain an overview of this data.

Over the last several years a team of researchers at the University of Graz and the Historical Commission created the first genuinely digital edition of the Imperial Diet of 1576. In this context it also experimented for the first time with methods of information extraction. A follow up project that is currently still in the application phase will focus on the topic history of the Imperial Diets in the 16th century. In a small project in spring 2024 the authors have tested a standard tool for topic modeling, Mallet (https://mimno.github.io/Mallet/topics.html), that is frequently used in Digital Humanities projects on the electronic texts of the digital edition of the Diet of 1576.

The heterogeneous edited, transcribed and annotated texts are segmented and have human assigned keywords for negotiation topics linked to the according index. These keywords follow the traditional indices from previous editions, but were slightly modified for the edition of 1576 (more abstract analytical terms; no complex, nested general registers of people, places and topics). This will be very useful when comparing them with computer generated topics to critically reflect on the editorial keywording and indexing of contemporary source texts that document the political discourse. Especially the automated generation and historiographical interpretation of topics and according keywords makes it possible to practise data and editorial criticism.

In order to contextualise the edition-critical results, the digital edition on 1576 was compared with a second edition: The Imperial Diet records from 1556/57, which are available in retro-digitised form (https://reichstagsakten.de/), are different structured texts (general index with links to PDFs of individual pages). This made it necessary to manually extract the subject headings from the general register and link them to specific text passages.

This experiment provides first insights into the potentials of topic modeling for the Imperial Diet records. It also highlights issues that will need to be addressed in the new project focusing on topic modeling and in which the assignment of negotiation topics in several editions can be checked and the keywords can be merged into a cross-edition index.

In representative democracy parliamentarians are elected to represent their voters. That they succeed doing this is one, if not the most, important goals in representative democracies (e.g. Pitkin 1967), and a a lot of research have studied to what extent this is achieved. For example, to what extent does parliamentarians represent people of different gender, ethnicity or age (see e.g. Elsässer and Schäfer 2023, Wägnerud 2009, Persson et al. 2023). However, one important aspect of representation is geographical representation, that is that parliamentarians represent the interests of all geographical regions of the polity. It is to this end that many representative democracies practically elect parliamentarians through local constituencies that are geographically spread through the country. However, to what extent geographical representation is substantially achieved is a question that has partially been overlooked. The purpose of this paper is to show how geographical text analysis (GTA) (see e.g. Porter et al. 2015) can be used to study geographical representation using parliamentary debates, and to study to what extent geographical representation is achieved in the Swedish Riksdag. In other words, what this paper does is that it studies which places that politicians mention in their parliamentary speeches.

When talking about representation, one often makes the distinction between substantial and descriptive representation (Pitkin 1967). While descriptive representation refer to whether parliamentarians share characteristics with those they represent, substantial representation refers to whether parliamentarians represent their political preferences. In the case of gender, the descriptive representation refers to whether the share of female parliamentarians is proportional to the share of females in the population, whereas substantial representation asks whether parliamentarians represent their interest. In the case of geographical representation, the equivalent questions become whether or not parliamentarians are elected from the all geographical regions, and whether they represent their interests. While the first question is ensured through the electoral system, the second question is less certain.

Prior research have mainly focused on substantial representation in terms of gender, ethnicity or class and less so in terms of geography. Prior research in Sweden have shown that parliamentarians adapt their language on immigration based on local conditions (Olander 2018), but we know little of how this generalizes to other forms of substantial representation. In a more local level Folke et al. (2021) found that where local politicians can reduce the likelihood of public bads in those areas, but we don’t know if parliamentarians in the national level act the same for those regions they are elected to represent. Beyond Sweden, there are a few studies that have started to study geographical representation in a broader sense, often through mentions of local regions. Using this studies have found several explanations of local representation, for example electoral volatility, politicians background and electoral system (Schürmann and Stier 2023, Zittel et al. 2021, Russo 2021, Nagtzaam and Louwerse 2023). However, most studies have been limited in temporal coverage, and carry methodological limitations.

To add to this literature, this study studies geographical representation in the Swedish Riksdag from 1864-2022 using the SWERIK dataset (Swerik 2023). To measure geographical representation, previous studies have mainly relied on dictionary approaches, which force the researcher to identify all possible references of local areas. To move beyond this, this study uses what can be referred to as geographical text analysis (see e.g. Porter et al. 2015). Specifically the study uses named-entity-recognition (NER) to extract all geographical mentions in the parliamentary data, the study then geotags all places in order to create a dataset of geographical representation over time.

Using this data, the study examine two aspects of geographical representation. First the study explores to what extent geographical representation is achieved, that is to what extent parliamentarians talk about a region proportional to how many people live there. Second, the study explores to what extent parliamentarians talk more about their constituency compared to other constituencies.

Overall, the contribution of this study is twofold. Firstly, this explores how geographical text analysis can be used to study parliamentary speech, to answer substantial questions of representation. Through exploratory analysis, the study also points to several avenues for future research. For example, geographical text analysis can be further used to study how globalization emerges through parliamentary speech. Secondly, this study contributes substantively to the literature of representation, by showing how local representation in Sweden have developed over time.

Parliamentary debates illustrate which legislative topics are relevant and how these topics shift over time. When observing how a specific topic is handled in the parliament, it is possible to pinpoint tangential topics and focal points. The identification of policy foci is particularly interesting in a cross-country comparison. In this contribution, we analyse and compare the results from seven years of parliamentary debates (2015-2022) from the British and Slovenian ParlaMint corpus (Erjavec et al. 2023). While previous research in comparative computational linguistics covered debates on migration (Blaette et al. 2020, Navarretta et al. 2022), attitudes to the EU (Hörner 2013), and right-wing populism (Schwalbach), we focus on the debates about the artificial intelligence (AI) to investigate how AI was discussed in the two countries.

The main research question is how the debates differ in the “industry leader” country, such as the UK, versus the “industry follower” country, such as Slovenia. To answer this question, we employ computational and close reading techniques. We used collocation networks to visualize the semantic relationships between words within the debates. By identifying frequently co-occurring word pairs, we discern key themes that centre around AI. We used word enrichment analysis to identify lexico-semantic patterns of each parliamentary discourse. This allowed us to pinpoint significant AI-related topics, revealing the unique emphases of British and Slovenian legislators. We used semantic document maps (Godec et al. 2021) to further elaborate on the topics pertinent to artificial intelligence. This provided a landscape of policy foci for further cross-country comparison. We supplemented the findings by close reading. We also analysed how the debate is characterised by parties and different MPs.

Initial observations reveal markedly different topics, reflecting the distinct political landscapes and socio-cultural contexts of the two nations. Both debates started to take off after 2016. However, the UK debate is much more prominent, while in Slovenia, there are more than a handful of mentions of AI only in the late 2019. The UK debate centres around protecting national interests, mostly in relation to company takeovers such as DeepMind. A prominent topic in the British subcorpus is also how AI can be implemented in healthcare. In Slovenia, on the other hand, the debate revolves around general digital transformation.

The presented research is part of a larger project mapping public values in algorithmic systems. Further research will include the analysis of additional national parliamentary debates from Denmark, Finland, and Sweden.