Parliamentary Speeches Research Articles

Publishing and using parliamentary Linked Data on the Semantic Web: ParliamentSampo system for Parliament of Finland

This paper presents a new infrastructure and semantic portal called ParliamentSampo for studying parliamentary speeches, culture, language, and activities in Finland. For the first time, the entire time series of some million plenary speeches of the Parliament of Finland (PoF) since 1907 have been converted from text into knowledge graphs and data services in unified formats, including CSV, Parla-CLARIN, ParlaMint, and RDF Linked Open Data (LOD). The speech data have been interlinked with a semi-automatically created ontology and a knowledge graph about the activities of over 2800 Members of Parliament (MP) and other speakers in the plenary sessions of the PoF. The data was enriched by data linking to external data sources and by reasoning into a broader LOD service. Knowledge extraction techniques based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) were used for automatic semantic annotations and topical classification of the speeches. The data and data services have been used in Digital Humanities (DH) research projects and for application development, especially for developing the in-use semantic portal ParliamentSampo. The infrastructure and the portal were published on February 14th 2023 on the Web using the open CC BY 4.0 license, and quickly gathered thousands of users, including citizens, media, politicians, and researchers of politics. ParliamentSampo is a new member in the “Sampo” series of over 20 interlinked LOD services and semantic portals in Finland, based on a national Semantic Web infrastructure. Although the paper uses Finnish parliamentary data as a case study, the approach, methods, and tools presented can be adapted also to other parliamentary datasets in other countries.

Partisan Politics in Finland

Abstract Traditionally, the Finnish party system has involved a high level of fragmentation yet remarkable stability, consensual decision-making, ideologically broad government coalitions, and mostly modest levels of polarization between parties or voters. These features suggest a limited effect of the party composition of government on economic policy. However, based on studies on close local elections, parliamentary speech, and party manifestos, we argue that the link between party politics and policy outcomes likely plays a role in Finland. Most analyses have examined the extent to which the characteristics of local politicians within the parties affect policy outcomes. These studies show that occupation, education, experience, competence, and residential location of local politicians strongly affect local policies, indicating that, in general, politics matters for policy. We also discuss how consensual national politics may have contributed to the recent success of the populist challenger Finns Party. As a new major player, the party has emphasized the role of sociocultural issues and especially affective polarization, which represents a considerable paradigm shift from the catch-all party policies typical of Finland for many decades. It is thus possible that the link between politics and policy will become more pronounced in the future, motivating further research.

‘Who called me a coward?’ Courtesy in the Belgian House of Representatives (1888–1910)

ABSTRACT On the increasingly heterogeneous yet still all-male debating scene of the Belgian House of Representatives around the turn of the twentieth century, language was not merely a practical tool for getting a point across or putting a topic on the agenda. The use of French as the standard debating language, along with specific parliamentary speech modes, which initially seemed tacitly agreed upon in the Belgian Chamber, gradually became highly symbolical instruments in negotiations about ‘proper’ representation and parliamentary conduct. This article investigates what courtesy meant, exactly, for the different Belgian députés around that time. How did their views on representation, dignity, and parliamentary courtesy change after the integration of Socialist and monolingual Dutch-speaking deputies into the not only French-inspired but also initially francophone Belgian assembly? How did these newcomers negotiate the parliamentary procedures in an attempt to mould them according to the changed practices of the House? Via a case-study of meta-debates on courtesy following the early use of Dutch in the Chamber between 1888 and 1910, this article sheds light on some important Belgian parliamentary tensions of that time concerning the deputies’ legitimacy claims. In their struggle to combine legitimacy towards their peers with legitimacy towards their electorate, the late-nineteenth-century newcomers in parliament (Socialists as well as Dutch-speaking Daensists) used similar strategies, making sure that the conventional orator(s) of their respective parties almost immediately counterbalanced or contextualized the language and actions of the more rebellious member(s).

In defence of democracy: parliamentary opposition and democratic resilience in Poland

ABSTRACT The 2023 electoral victory of Poland's liberal opposition halted democratic backsliding and exemplified democratic resilience. This study provides a novel empirical analysis of discursive strategies used by the main opposition party, Civic Platform/Civic Coalition, in parliamentary speeches on democracy from 2001 to 2020. Using a mixed-method approach with temporally sensitive word embeddings and discourse analysis, we highlight shifts in opposition discourse since 2015 – from radicalisation to a more moderate, focused response addressing key aspects of democratic breakdown – demonstrating an adaptive strategy of democratic resilience.

Central banks, economic statecraft and offshore banking: Comparing financial internationalization strategies in Latvia and Estonia

Small states play a critical role in the operation of the Global Wealth Chains, storing capital assets and funnelling financial flows. However, the knowledge of how such practices of financial transit emerge remains scant. Focussing on the 1990s as the formative decade of post-Soviet capitalism, the article focuses on the variegated financial internationalization in the Baltics, as Latvia developed a vibrant offshore banking sector, whereas Estonia pursued complete Westernization in bank ownership. Challenging the literature that relates the emergence of Baltic offshore finance with right-wing politics, and existing trade and cultural links with Russia, the article argues that the varieties of financial internationalization in the Baltics were due to ‘economic statecraft’ by the Central Banks (CBs). Drawing upon a survey of CB reports, parliamentary speeches, press archives, memoirs, and elite interviews, the article argues that the Baltic CBs’ path-setting decisions shaped the two distinct financial internationalization paths through three interventions: currency reforms, agenda setting, and banking regulation. Drawing on the literature on social embeddedness of CBs, the article attributes the differences in the two CB approaches to their informal alliances with broader society – domestic financiers in Latvia and the government in Estonia.

Hansard as Literary Reception: The Uses of Poetry in Australian Political Debate, 1901–1950

ABSTRACT Hansard—Australia’s record of parliamentary debate—might seem an unlikely site for literary analysis. It is, however, a publisher of original poetry and its criticism a forum for the performance and citation of poetry, and a complex archive of literary reception in Australia since Federation. In this paper, we discuss our findings in relation to the uses of poetry in the Australian Hansard from 1901 to 1950, focusing on how the work of two settler Australian poet-parliamentarians, J. K. McDougall and John Cash Neild, is put to use in parliamentary speeches as recorded in Hansard. Together, these examples indicate that poetry is not only deployed for a range of heightened rhetorical effects on the floor of parliament; it is also part of the fabric of routine political debate, put to a range of adversarial and racist purposes, and part of the wider history of literary publication and reception.

PopBERT. Detecting Populism and Its Host Ideologies in the German Bundestag

Abstract The rise of populism concerns many political scientists and practitioners, yet the detection of its underlying language remains fragmentary. This paper aims to provide a reliable, valid, and scalable approach to measure populist rhetoric. For that purpose, we created an annotated dataset based on parliamentary speeches of the German Bundestag (2013–2021). Following the ideational definition of populism, we label moralizing references to “the virtuous people” or “the corrupt elite” as core dimensions of populist language. To identify, in addition, how the thin ideology of populism is “thickened,” we annotate how populist statements are attached to left-wing or right-wing host ideologies. We then train a transformer-based model (PopBERT) as a multilabel classifier to detect and quantify each dimension. A battery of validation checks reveals that the model has a strong predictive accuracy, provides high qualitative face validity, matches party rankings of expert surveys, and detects out-of-sample text snippets correctly. PopBERT enables dynamic analyses of how German-speaking politicians and parties use populist language as a strategic device. Furthermore, the annotator-level data may also be applied in cross-domain applications or to develop related classifiers.

From Speech to Feed: How Parliamentary Debates Shape Party Agendas on Social Media‌

AbstractSocial media has become an increasingly important tool for parties to set issues on the political agenda. However, its rapid rise raises questions about the role of traditional venues such as parliaments. This study hypothesizes that parties strategically choose to initiate issues in parliamentary debates instead of on social media to establish dominance through real‐time discussions. Consequently, only after these issues are introduced and debated in parliament do parties use digital platforms like social media to reinforce them on the political agenda. Analyzing over 430,000 parliamentary speeches and 240,000 Facebook posts by parties in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, and the UK, from 2010 to 2022, the study reveals that issues discussed in parliamentary debates—primarily those raised by opposition parties—typically do not initially emerge on social media but only attract online attention after being introduced in parliament. These findings offer new insights into the strategic decisions of parties in agenda‐setting.

Studying word meaning evolution through incremental semantic shift detection

AbstractThe study of semantic shift, that is, of how words change meaning as a consequence of social practices, events and political circumstances, is relevant in Natural Language Processing, Linguistics, and Social Sciences. The increasing availability of large diachronic corpora and advance in computational semantics have accelerated the development of computational approaches to detecting such shift. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to tracing the evolution of word meaning over time. Our analysis focuses on gradual changes in word semantics and relies on an incremental approach to semantic shift detection (SSD) called What is Done is Done (WiDiD). WiDiD leverages scalable and evolutionary clustering of contextualised word embeddings to detect semantic shift and capture temporal transactions in word meanings. Existing approaches to SSD: (a) significantly simplify the semantic shift problem to cover change between two (or a few) time points, and (b) consider the existing corpora as static. We instead treat SSD as an organic process in which word meanings evolve across tens or even hundreds of time periods as the corpus is progressively made available. This results in an extremely demanding task that entails a multitude of intricate decisions. We demonstrate the applicability of this incremental approach on a diachronic corpus of Italian parliamentary speeches spanning eighteen distinct time periods. We also evaluate its performance on seven popular labelled benchmarks for SSD across multiple languages. Empirical results show that our results are comparable to state-of-the-art approaches, while outperforming the state-of-the-art for certain languages.

The language and motivations of expertise in political discourse

The study aims to explore how language elements of specialised and political communication are represented in parliamentary discourse. Within the ParlaMint corpus, we examine Hungarian parliamentary speeches between 2020 and 2022 on the ‘KATA’ (specific tax of small taxpayer businesses). The specialised terms, terms used in standard language, sentiment and attitude values are analysed. Results show that there is a significant difference in term use and the sentence sentiments between the different discourse participants (policy actors, opposition, governing party). There are only a few emotionless speeches, and no large differences in the proportion of terms and emotions are observed. The results can be relevant for studies on populist communication, the relationship between technocracy and democracy, and the methodological aspects of computer-assisted discourse analysis. The paper also outlines future orientations for research, including extended thematic analysis and investigation of contextual shifts in the actual meaning of terms within political discourse.

Em defesa das crianças? A instrumentalização da democracia no discurso antigênero

This article seeks to analyze, through the Content Analysis of parliamentary speeches and videos of leaderships and religious public figures, the discourse on the so-called "gender ideology" in the Brazilian House of Representatives between 2015 and 2019. In order to prevent the advancement of sexual and reproductive rights and spread traditional morality in education, the lexicon of democracy is used as a tool and Christian values receive a secular camouflage. Therefore, the de-democratizing political-religious action is legitimized in the public arena, enabling, as a consequence, the precariousness of lives and the perpetuation of inequalities and violence faced by historically subalternized groups, such as trans people, cisgender women and sexual dissidents.

Fiscal policy in the Bundestag: Textual analysis and macroeconomic effects

Fiscal policy is made in parliaments. We go to the roots of changes of fiscal policy in Germany and use a novel data set on all parliamentary speeches in the Bundestag from 1960 to 2021. We propose an embedding-based approach, which allows the representation of words and documents in a shared vector space, in order to measure fiscal policy-related sentiment in parliamentary debates at a scale from contractionary to expansionary. We also distinguish between sentiment related to exogenous and endogenous fiscal policy. We put fiscal sentiment into a series of recursively-identified vector autoregressive models to show that a change in fiscal sentiment causes a shift in government spending and has significant effects on the macroeconomy. The results support the notion that the debate in parliament contains information for the identification of government spending shocks.

Sickly, Idle and Risky Minorities: Race and Diabetes under Singapore’s Emergent “Insurantial Imaginary”

This article highlights the role of the “insurantial imaginary”, defined as a social context in which profitable, useful and necessary uses can be found for insurance technology, as a condition that shaped the articulation of the sickly, idle and risky racial minorities within Singapore’s public health discourse on diabetes. Focusing on parliamentary speeches relating to diabetes between 1965 to 2020 as well as healthcare financing policy documents, I argue that the narrative of sickly, idle and risky minorities bodies tied to broader notions of racialized responsibility and accountability emerged sharply under a universal national health insurance system. Where parliamentary discussions on diabetes as a public health issue before the institution of universal health insurance circa 2014 utilized racial categories in the classificatory or administrative sense, these very categories became endowed with new meanings and moral imperatives, where Malays and Indians were urged to lead healthier lifestyles to reduce the national insurantial burden. This study builds on the literature on race in medicine by underlining the role of healthcare financing as a technology of racial biopolitics.

Practice makes ‘perfect’? The effect of committee specialization on the complexity of parliamentary speeches

Abstract The complexity of parliamentary speeches is usually interpreted as an MP’s electoral strategy. We take the prism of parliamentary specialization and connect it to the use of issue-specific jargon learned during parliamentary work. We expect that membership in a parliamentary committee and increased experience within it increases the complexity of an MP’s speech about committee-related issues, and that the effect of the work in the committee is stronger for MPs without a previous committee-related professional background. We test our expectations on almost 54,000 speeches in the Czech Chamber of Deputies (2006–2021), using the Flesch Reading Ease formula adapted for the Czech language. The novel dataset connects parliamentary speeches to personal information about the MPs and to responsible committees. The results show the expected effect of committee membership and committee experience, and the interaction effect of a professional background.

Ideologies as conceptual networks: towards a data-intensive approach

ABSTRACT This article introduces a data-intensive approach to visualizing political ideologies as text networks. The methodology combines network theory with collocation analysis from corpus linguistics. Its similarities and differences to Michael Freeden’s morphological approach are highlighted. The prospects are examined by focusing on the case study of Finnish socialism in the early 20th century. Primary sources consist of printed labor newspapers, handwritten newspapers produced by ordinary working people, and parliamentary speeches. The empirical part demonstrates that the network approach is useful for (1) locating key political words based on centrality in the network, (2) identifying clusters of words related to each other more strongly than to the rest of the network, and (3) seeing the structure of an ideological network. The main contribution of the article is methodological for the approach can be applied to other machine-readable sources, both at small and large scales, to automatically extract information on the linguistic patterns characteristic of a political ideology under investigation.

Navigating pandemic waves: Consensus, polarisation and pluralism in the Finnish parliament during COVID-19

This article studies how the COVID crisis affected polarisation, politicisation and consensus in Finnish parliamentary discourse, a case in which we expect pluralist political institutions and culture to mitigate polarisation. In addition to the empirical contribution, we add to the theory of polarisation by drawing from Chantal Mouffe’s theory of plural democracy to argue that the opposite of polarisation may take the form of a depoliticised consensus or a pluralism of legitimate positions (‘agonism’). Furthermore, we apply Norman and Isabela Fairclough’s political discourse analysis to studying polarisation qualitatively, arguing that scrutiny of argumentative premises enables assessment of how profound certain political conflicts are. Studying 485 parliamentary speeches given in 2020–2021, we argue that a morally charged consensus imperative with nationalistic overtones quickly developed in Spring 2020, and pluralism gradually re-emerged later. The article highlights that while polarisation can threaten democracy, so can moralisation and enforced consensus.

Disintegration and party competition: evidence from parliamentary speeches on Brexit

ABSTRACT How do political parties in the European Union (EU) react to disintegration bids from a member state? This question is important, as scholars have argued that framing by elites (particularly Eurosceptic entrepreneurs) is crucial in shaping whether disintegration is seen as an example to follow or one to avoid. This article investigates how parties outside the UK reacted to Brexit, and argues that Eurosceptic challenger parties and mainstream pro-European parties altered their stances after the referendum vote in June 2016. I use a combination of automated and hand-coded methods to identify and analyse 2223 Brexit statements in the parliaments of five member states between 2013 and 2018. I show how after the referendum vote, challenger parties avoid Brexit and significantly moderate the Euroscepticism in their Brexit statements. By contrast mainstream parties emphasise Brexit and significantly increase the pro-Europeanism in their Brexit statements. Results show that in the short term at least, there is little evidence of Eurosceptic entrepreneurs framing Brexit as a positive precedent or example to follow.

The effect of temperature on language complexity: Evidence from seven million parliamentary speeches

Climate change carries important effects on human wellbeing and performance, and increasingly research is documenting the negative impacts of out-of-comfort temperatures on workplace performance. In this study, we investigate the plausibly causal effect of extreme temperatures, i.e., out-of-comfort, on language complexity among politicians, leveraging a fixed effects strategy. We analyze language complexity in over seven million parliamentary speeches across eight countries, connecting them with precise daily meteorological information. We find hot days reduce politicians' language complexity, but not cold days. Focusing on one country, we explore marginal effects by age and gender, suggesting high temperatures significantly impact older politicians at lower thresholds. The findings propose that political rhetoric is not only driven by political circumstances and strategic concerns but also by physiological responses to external environmental factors. Overall, the study holds important implications on how climate change could affect human cognitive performance and the quality of political discourse.

Self-mediatisation and the format of Swedish parliamentary speeches: Speech length and political slogans, 1920–2019

Abstract In this article, we investigate traces of a news media logic in the Swedish parliamentary speeches from 1920 to 2019. Drawing on theories of mediatisation, we examine two aspects: the length of the speeches and repeated political slogans. Our analysis is based on a complete corpus of parliamentary records with annotated speeches. Speech length was measured based on word count, and the identification of slogans was based on repeated seven-word segments, filtered to exclude generic phrases. While it is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions about the influence of an external media logic, the speech length has dropped by 50 per cent since 1920. This change relates to new parliamentary procedures, and from the 1980s, with the explicit goal to attract the news media. Short and snappy political slogans have increased significantly since the 1990s. This development reflects previous research stating that sound bites are getting shorter.

New Political Phraseology in Bulgarian Public Speech

This text explores the potential for updating the phraseological fund of the Bulgarian language in the Bulgarian public discourse and examines the influence of different types of updates on the specifics of the functioning of the given phraseological units in public speech. The most visible updates are those that clearly introduce new elements into the meaning of the original sustained phrase, but at the same time retain the obvious connection to the original language unit. Phraseological units, which are generally distinguished by semantic indivisibility, stability of their lexical composition, invariable structure, imagery, emotionality and expressiveness, are subject to dynamic changes occurring in Bulgarian language in recent years. We direct our interest to stable expressions, in the composition of which a new component appears as a manifestation of lexical dynamics, which replaces an already established one, or an additional element appears in the structure of a phraseology, i.e. our attention will be directed mainly to the so-called lexical updates of the phraseological fund. In the text, we trace the change (structural and semantic) in a number of phraseological units in the Bulgarian language, in which the entry of the lexical component kopeyka is observed. The excerpted material is from two corpora – CLASSLA-web.bg (Bulgarian web) and the corpus of parliamentary speech ParlaMint corpus: https://www.clarin.si/ske/#concordance. The examples extracted from the corpora are relevant for tracking the changes we are interested in in the phraseological fund of the modern Bulgarian language.