Parliamentary Debates in Norway: A Computational Social Science Approach

Legislative debates are understudied in political science. Modern tools for analyzing speech content has, fortunately, given us an opportunity to make inferences based on an ever increasing accessibility of vast corpora of texts that has only been analyzed in parts before. This thesis covers Norwegian parliamentary debates with the overarching theme of using speech to assess the effects of institutional and external shocks on MP behavior. The thesis has three main contributions. First, it provides a large corpus of automatically annotated Norwegian parliamentary debates – both the first openly accessible structured data on parliamentary debates in Norway and the first open access linguistically annotated parliamentary speech data in the world. Second, the thesis shows how contextual knowledge and data pre-processing is invaluable for subsequent analyses. Finally, the thesis gives two examples of inferential analyses on MP behavior based on parliamentary debates: these analyses show that changing electoral systems alters the vote-seeking incentives of MPs and that disproportional external shocks alter the behavior of MPs based on their constituency, rather than party affiliation