Electoral Reform and Parliamentary Debates

Abstract

The early twentieth century saw many democracies adopt proportional representative systems. The textbook explanation, pioneered by Rokkan, emphasize between‐party electoral competition; the rise of the Socialist vote share made Bourgeois parties prefer PR systems to maximize their seat share. While appealing, this account is not entirely compelling. Consequently, scholars are investigating within‐party explanations of support for such reforms. Particularly, Cox, Fiva, and Smith show how list PR enable party leaders to discipline members and build cohesive parties. Relying on roll‐call votes across the Norwegian 1919 electoral reform from two‐round single‐member plurality to closed‐list PR, they show that the internal party cohesion increased following the reform. We investigate how the Norwegian electoral reform changed the content of parliamentary speeches. Comparing speeches from MPs present both before and after the reform, we show how parties become more cohesive in parliamentary debates under list PR than they were under the single‐member‐district system.

Electoral Reform and Strategic Coordination

“…In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Storting agenda was dominated by discussions concerning the primary industry, military budgets, educational reforms and infrastructure expansions (especially by rail) (Høyland and Søyland 2019). Class antagonisms were acute in this period and the labor movement was hostile to bourgeois society (Helland and Saglie 2003).…”

“…In a related study,Høyland and Søyland (2019) find that the PR reform shifted the focus of speeches from individual MPs to parties.…”

Do the populists have a say? Estimating their effect on topic prevalence and polarization in German state legislature

“…Researchers are interested in working with parliamentary data as it is supposedly the heart of any democracy (Proksch and Slapin 2012). They use parliamentary speeches, for instance, to determine which aspects influence policy positions of MPs (Proksch and Slapin 2010;Schwarz, Traber, and Benoit 2017;Willis 2017;Tzelgov and Olander 2018) or the parliament's agenda (Greene and Cross 2017;Senninger and Bischof 2018;Høyland and Søyland 2019).…”

“…At the beginning of this century, scientists started to use scaling algorithms such as wordfish and wordscore to place party manifestos on an ideological scale (Laver, Benoit, and Garry 2003;Laver and Garry 2000). Today, the research which uses Tzelgov and Olander (2018), and Benoit and Herzog (2017); Schwarz, Traber, and Benoit (2017), Lauderdale and Herzog (2016), and Debus and Bäck (2014); Proksch and Slapin (2012), Proksch and Slapin (2010), and Slapin and Proksch (2008) scaling algorithms Diermeier et al (2012) SVM Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Taddy (2016) custom model polarization Curini, Hino, and Osaka (2018) wordfish Goet (2019), Abercrombie and Batista-Navarro (2018), and Peterson and Spirling (2018) text classifier Spirling, Huang, and Patrick (2018) bayesian Rheault and Cochrane (2019) word embeddings sentiment Rheault, Beelen, et al (2016) GloVe Proksch, Lowe, et al (2018) Multilingual dictionary floor time Blumenau (2019) and Bäck, Debus, and Müller (2014) regression topical prevalence Høyland and Søyland (2019) and Greene and Cross (2017) topic models…”

“…However, with advances in the fields of computer science, i.e. natural language processing, and linguistics, political scientists have started to explore classification algorithms (Peterson and Spirling 2018;Goet 2019; Abercrombie and Batista-Navarro 2018), topic models (Høyland and Søyland 2019;Greene and Cross 2017) and word embeddings for their research (Rheault and Cochrane 2019;Rheault, Beelen, et al 2016).…”