Conference Agenda

During the last four decades, the Swedish education system has gone through a transformation from one of the most centrally planned and uniform to one of the most marketized and decentralized in the OECD area (cf. Fredriksson, 2010; Lundahl et al., 2013). Though part of a global trend of marketization of welfare services (Fuller, 2019), the development of the Swedish education system is more radical in comparison both with other welfare areas in Sweden, as well with eduction reforms in other countries (Lundahl, 2016). As such, the trajectory of Swedish education policy from the 1980s until today can be described as a shift between two extreme positions seldom witnessed in neither welfare policy nor education policy research (Fredriksson, 2010).

While a large number of studies have produced important insights into the causes, processes and consequences of this development (cf. Fredriksson, 2010; Ringarp, 2011 & Hultén, 2019), the complexity, fragmentation and extension of this process have made comprehensive and systematic analyses difficult. The task of analyzing this policy process expands beyond what is possible in traditional qualitative policy analysis. This paper aims to illustrate the potential in utilizing novel computational methods and open parliamentary data to systematically investigate the complex processes of educational reform. The paper makes use of the recent development in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyse the parliamentary debate on school marketization in Sweden.

Aim and research questions

The study draws on the comprehensive and systematized record of the Swedish parliament's current and historical work, made public as open resource (data.riksdagen.se). Using a combination of computational techniques ­– including sentiment analysis, and topic modeling – as well as qualitative text analysis, this study aims to map the dominant arguments in parliamentary debates surrounding the marketization of the Swedish education system, between 1993 and 2023. The study is guided by the following research questions:

1. What the most frequent types of arguments made in the parliamentary debate on school marketization in Sweden, 1993-2023?

2. How does the prevalence of these different types of arguments change over time?

3. How does the prevalence of these different types of arguments vary across parties?

4. What MPs and political parties are most active in the debate on school marketization across the time period, 1993-2023?

Taken together, answering these research questions will lay the foundation for creating a comprehensive picture of the structure and development of argumentation in the parliamentary debate related to school marketization in the Swedish parliament.

Theory

The marketization of the Swedish education system can be said to represent a paradigm shift in education policy (Lundahl et al., 2013; Alexiadou & Lundahl, 2016). A policy paradigm can be defined as “a framework of ideas and standards that specifies not only the goals of policy and the kinds of instruments that are used to attain them, but also the very nature of the problems they are meant to be addressing” (Hall, 1993: 278). In very general terms, the transformation of the swedish education system in a marketized direction represent a shift in understanding of the central problems of education policy, from a problem of attaining equity and equality, towards a problem of insufficient efficiency and flexibility in the school system (Börjesson, 2016: 77 & 144). This shift in definition of the central problems of education policy was followed by a transformation of the policy instruments used as well as the goals of those instruments.

A paradigmatic view of policy change is thus a suitable theoretical framework for analyzing the marketization of the Swedish education system. Such a perspective puts focus on the link between ideational dynamics, the ebb and flow of normative ideas about education, and the policy instruments designed and implemented. Policy paradigm theory suggests that the understanding of policy development requires analysis of the problems and goals identified in the policy debate.

This paper focuses on understanding the ideational development in the parliamentary debate on school marketization. The empirical basis is open parliament data, that form an ample basis for empirically analyzing policy actors’ normative ideas, not least through transcripts of parliamentary speeches and debates.

Data and materials

The data utilized in this study comes from the open data of the Swedish parliament, available at https://data.riksdagen.se/. This data-base includes: parliamentary speeches, government bills, motions, government commission reports, voting records, and records of appointments. The sample selected for for analysis consists of all parliamentary speeches identified using the search term “friskol*” (i.e. independent schools with alternative word endings) in the open data of the Swedish parliament (using the GUI riksdagssök – riksdagsdata.oru.se), between 1993 and 2023. The sample consists of 2538 speeches made by 1279 members of parliament. Apart from a text transcript of the speech the data consists of the time of the speech as well as party affiliation, name and identification number of each speaker.

The search term chosen to delimit the sample, friskola, [independent school], is a central concept in the debate on school marketization. The central reform creating a quasi-market among education providers did so by allowing privately operated and owned schools to receive equivalent public funding per student as public schools. However, the sample used is not comprehensive as parts of the debate about school marketization can consist of speeches not mentioning independent schools.

Research methods

The first stage of the analysis consisted of applying automated NLP-technologies (using Dcipher Analytics, https://www.dcipheranalytics.com) to extract arguments in the data set. First, a rough set of arguments were identified using GPT-3. Each argument was classified based on its sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) using sentiment analysis. The arguments were then plotted on a two-dimensional vector space, and clustered into distinct topics using topic detection (Figure 1). Finally, clusters were aggregated, yielding a preliminary compilation of 88 different machine-identified arguments, each with aggregated information including 15 debate excerpts illustrative of the particular argument.

In the second stage of the analysis, each of the arguments, were validated, refuted or refined through qualitative analysis of the debate excerpts as data. In each excerpt collection, arguments (i.e. claims and premises, see Rocha et.al. 2022) were manually identified, categorized as pro or contra educational marketization and labelled inductively. The automated sentiment analysis of stage one proved to be inadequate in identifying pro and contra arguments (an argument in favour of a particular view may well be stated in a negative sentiment, e.g. independent schools are not inferior schools). The qualitative analysis resulted in a tentative, high-level typology comprising four (4) main topics and nine (9) argument types for and against independent schools was developed and used to code the data set.

Preliminary results

• The arguments put forward in the parliamentary debate on school marketization a are characterized by a broad diversity of topics. However, four high level topics can be distinguished that encompass a substantial share of the arguments made. These are:
  • Meta-debate on school marketization: As any other policy debate, the parliamentary debate on school marketization has a substantial element of meta-debate or a debate on the subject of debating school marketization. Meta-debate arguments are concerned with the debate itself (e.g. is school marketization an important issue to debate), or on the actors of the debate (e.g. debating the credibility of MPs or political parties).
  • Organization of the school market: The organization of the school market is one prevalent topic in the parliamentary debate on school marketization. Rather than question or defend the existence of a school market the arguments made within this topic of the debate focus on how such a market should be organized.
  • Existence of the school market: While arguments in this category often resemble those in other categories, the difference lies in their starting point. What is debated in this theme is the existence of the marketized school system in itself, rather than its organization or regulation. Hence, the debate focuses on whether the system should prevail or be abandoned.
  • Quality of independent schools: The last theme of arguments in the debate on school marketization concerns the quality of independent schools. While there are arguments put forward on both sides, it is important to point out the strong skewness towards pro-marketization arguments within this theme.

• There has been a gradual shift in issue ownership in the parliamentary debate on school marketization over time, from the ideological right to left. At the start of the investigated time-period, the political right dominated the debate. However, gradually over time MPs from the parties on the left have become more active in the debate on school marketization.

• The distribution of parliamentary speeches among Swedish MPs follows a clear power law, or long-tail distribution. A small minority of MPs have conducted a majority of the parliamentary speeches mentioning independent schools. The large majority of MPs that have mentioned independent schools in parliamentary speeches have done so in few or single speeches, while 11% (n=114) of the MPs stand for a majority of speeches mentioning independent schools.

According to the Finnish law (Constitution of Finland §51) only the two official languages of Finland – Finnish and Swedish – are allowed to be used in the Finnish parliament (Eduskunta) but fragments of other languages are sometimes present in the discussions as well. However, the presence of these fragments has not been extensively studied, e.g. are certain topics more prone to include fragments of foreign languages. The speeches given in the Finnish parliament have been topic modelled before (Loukasmäki & Makkonen 2019, Ristilä & Elo 2023) but the distribution of languages over topics has not been studied.

This study attempts to fill this gap by examining the distributions of Swedish, English and Latin across topics identified in the Finnish parliament 1970-2020 and discussing the different languages’ functions in the parliamentary context. These three languages have very different popularity trends: Swedish is an official language in Finland but its use has been in decline for a long time, English is not an official language in Finland but generally used as lingua franca, and Latin is a dead language but has a strong footing in especially legal contexts. Comparing the topic distributions of these languages gives us better understanding of their functions in the political context, and of how and why different languages can be used as political tools and devices.

The materials used in this study are the plenary speeches given in the Finnish parliament between 1970 and 2020. The speeches have been made computer readable and enriched with metadata (Hyvönen et al 2024).

This study built on the topic model by Ristilä and Elo (2023) and used language detection (Python’s Lingua library) to define what languages are present in which topics. Language use occurrences and, when necessary, their surrounding context was processed through the topic model to get topic distributions for each language. The topic model was monolingual, and since there were many Swedish passages, all Swedish contents were machine translated into Finnish (eTranslation). English and Latin only appeared as small fragments, so their close context was used to define the topics.

Functions of language use were defined with close reading. Ten function categories were defined for all languages, and additional three for Swedish. These were divided into two groups: functional and rhetoric. Kari Palonen’s four concepts of politics (Palonen 2003, 1993) – policy, polity, politicking and politicization – were used to get a better understanding of how the functions work in a political context: policy entails the regulation aspect of politics, polity can be understood as the sphere of established norms and procedures, politicking is the performative aspect of politics, and politicization makes something political. Especially the politicization function of language choice, or the making of something political just by using a marked (nontypical) language, was of interest.

The preliminary results indicate that Swedish and Latin usages have very similar topic distributions. Both were used significantly more than average around topics named public sector and legislation, and significantly less in topics foreign and security policy and traffic and transport. The distribution of English usage, on the other hand, closely followed the average topic distribution, reflecting its commonplace role.

Sweden, Finland, and Norway share a longstanding tradition of public access rights known as allemansrätten, which grants access to nature for activities such as camping and foraging on both public and private lands. What is interesting, however, is that allemansrätten, although considered an age-old Nordic custom, was not named until the 1930s and only gained common usage after World War II. This has led some scholars to view allemansrätten as a political construct and to challenge the prevailing narrative about the historical roots of these public access rights (see e.g. Wiktorsson 1996; Valguarnera 2016). The later history of the term allemansrätten has been explored through parliamentary debates in Finland (Kettunen & La Mela 2022), and in Sweden through selected Swedish parliamentary motions, protocols, and official inquiries (Sténs & Sandström 2014). This paper focuses on the roots of allemansrätten before the term was coined, through parliamentary debates in Sweden and Finland. It asks whether such practices of access rights to nature were recognized in Sweden and Finland before they received the name “allemansrätten”; in other words, to what extent can we identify the concept or idea before it was formally defined?

The data used in the paper is linked open parliamentary datasets published in both countries: in Sweden in the SWERIK project for the years 1867-2022 (https://swerik-project.github.io/), and in Finland in the Semantic Parliament project from 1907 until today (Hyvönen et al. 2023). The paper builds on the approaches in digital conceptual history that employs parliamentary debate data (see e.g. Jarlbrink & Noren 2023; Ihalainen & Sahala 2020; Elo 2022). As the concept of allemansrätten (in Finnish, jokamiehenoikeus) becomes a shared concept between Sweden and Finland after the 1940s, provides the study of the national parliamentary debates from these countries a way to follow and contrast the trajectories in how the term became articulated. At this first stage of research, the paper focuses on the years where the two datasets converge, thus on the years from 1907 onwards. Moreover, the focus is on the practices of access of nature by studying debates about foraging for the resources of wild nature. This is done because the (universal) right to forage berries, mushrooms, and non-protected plants, is at the core of today’s allemansrätten.

The paper presents the preliminary results where the the access rights are traced in the debates at two levels. First, the paper examines the debates where wild berries and mushrooms are mentioned, and investigates the word contexts around them. Second, the paper employs topic modeling in the Swedish parliamentary debates to identify access rights-related debates with a particular focus again on foraging and the use of wild resources as key terms. For this, the paper applies the Swedish BERTopic implementation and the BERT language models developed by the Swedish National Library (KBLab). The topic modeling is guided with other seeds too that are key terms from contemporary debates on allemansrätten, such as access right, outdoor recreation, that allows to converge the models towards topics where the concept appears. During both steps, the identified debates are classified manually based on their legislative context and read more closely to study the views of the members of parliament.

The paper contributes to offering new knowledge about the early roots of allemansrätten. It also provides an example of how to identify and study a concept through the semantic content in a bilingual parliament dataset, rather than approaching it by the term that identifies the concept.

References

Elo, K. 2022. Debates on European Integration in the Finnish Parliament (Eduskunta) 1990-2020. In Proceedings of the Digital Parliamentary Data in Action (DiPaDA 2022) Workshop, CEUR-WS, 129-145.

Hyvönen E., Sinikallio S., Leskinen P., Drobac S., Leal R., La Mela M., Tuominen J., Poikkimäki H., & Rantala H. 2023. Plenary Speeches of the Parliament of Finland as Linked Open Data and Data Services. Proceedings of the International Workshop of Knowledge Generation from Text (TEX2KG), co-located with ESWC 2023, Hersonissos, Greece, May 29th, 2023. CEUR Workshop Proceedings 3447, 1–20.

Ihalainen, P. & Sahala, A. 2020. Evolving conceptualisations of internationalism in the UK parliament: Collocation analyses from the League to Brexit. In Fridlund, M., Oiva, M., Paju, P. (Eds). Digital Histories: Emergent Approaches within the New Digital History. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press.

Jarlbrink, J., & Norén, F. 2023. The rise and fall of ‘propaganda’ as a positive concept: a digital reading of Swedish parliamentary records, 1867–2019. Scandinavian Journal of History, 48(3), 379-399.

Kettunen K. & La Mela M. 2022. Semantic tagging and the Nordic tradition of Everyman’s rights. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 37(2), 483-496.

Sténs, A. & Sandström, C. 2014. Allemansrätten in Sweden: a resistant custom. Landscapes, 15(2): 106–18.

Valguarnera, F. 2016. Allemansrätten: en internationell förebild. Nordisk miljörättslig tidskrift, 147-159.

Wiktorsson, G. 1996. Den grundlagsskyddade myten: om allemansrättens lansering i Sverige. Stockholm: City Univ. Press.

This paper analyses the contextual variation of nouns and adjectives related to democracy in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland in the twentieth century. We compare parliamentary data (Hansard, Riksdag, and Eduskunta) against press data (UK: Guardian and Times, Sweden: Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet, Finland: Helsingin Sanomat and Suomen Kuvalehti). By including both liberal and conservative newspapers as well as parliamentary speeches, our study offers a fresh perspective on the relation between democratic discourses produced by politicians and journalists.

The approach includes visualizing the main similarities and differences in the use of democratic vocabulary between multiple historical time series datasets, as well as applying cross-correlation analysis to automatically find identical patterns between parliament and media or across different nations. The similarity of various word frequency time series charts is evaluated using the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC), which can vary from -1 to 1. When two time series display simultaneous increases and decreases, the PCC value is nearer to 1 (Derrick & Thomas 2004). The strengths of the PCC are its mathematical simplicity, easy interpretability, and tolerance for noise, while its main limitation is sensitivity to extreme outliers which can be mitigated by using sliding windows to analyze segments of the time series instead of the whole.

Our findings indicate that the cross-correlation is strongest between similar political terms in the same dataset, e.g., the relative frequency of “democracy” and “democratic” over time in a national parliament (in Hansard 0.91, Riksdag 0.76, and Eduskunta 0.65). Another strong set of cross-correlations can be observed when the same political term appears in different datasets from the same country, e.g., the frequency of “democracy” in liberal and conservative press (in the UK 0.87, in Sweden 0.82, and 0.61 in Finland). Transnational correlations of political terms were not as strong as intra-national correlations, but they were clearly evident in the PCC values, e.g., for the frequency of “democracy” they varied from 0.58 to 0.68 between three parliaments under investigation. The shared patterns between parliaments include general increase in the use of “democracy” over time, with notable peaks in the 1930s as a reaction to totalitarianism, around the year 1968 related to the rise of social movements, and in the 1990s, with the expansion of digital communication (Ihalainen et al. 2022). We ensured that our results were not due to intrinsic structural properties of the chosen datasets by calculating the PCC values also for non-political terms, which showed weak or non-existent correlation between political and non-political terms.

Methodologically, our contribution introduces time series methods to the digital humanities, a field which has mostly focused on the manual examination of time series visualizations, with only a few exceptions (Wevers, Gao & Nielbo 2020). From the humanities perspective, we empirically demonstrate the strong linkage between the political discourses in parliament and the press, challenging the notion of parliamentary speech as elite political speech, distinct from a broader society.