Analyzing Temporalities in Parliamentary Speech about Ideologies Using Dependency Parsed Data

Abstract

The temporal aspects of politics have been discussed extensively by political theorists, but have not been explored using grammatically parsed textual datasets. This paper explores the ways in which future, present and past are projected and referred to in speeches in the Finnish parliament that talk about ideologies. Ideologies are crucial categories of thinking about the political past and future and therefore serve as a case in which temporality is expressed in a variety of ways. We use a dataset drawn from Finnish parliamentary records from 1980 to 2021 and operationalize morpho-syntactic information on clause structures and grammatical tense system to explore the different temporal profiles of ideologies. We show how some isms, like communism and fascism, are much more likely to appear in the context of the past, whereas others, like capitalism and racism, tend to appear in the present tense. We further develop a framework for analyzing temporality based on clause structures and grammatical tense and relate that to how the study of politics has approached time in parliamentary speaking.