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Contributivism refers to the principle of conditioning rights to political participation on economic and other contributions. Access to citizenship and voting rights for immigrants often requires ‘doing something for’ the host society, which is usually measured in material terms. The limited research on ‘contributivism’ to date has focused on laws, norms, and public opinion. Little is known about the politics of contributivism, the positions of different parties, and the reasons for supporting or opposing it. This article analyses parliamentary debates on voting and citizenship rights in four European countries – Italy, UK, France, and Germany – since 2010 to identify the different interpretations that European legislators attach to the concept of ‘contributivism’. The discourse analysis reveals that a range of contributions are identified as prerequisites for participation: economic contributions, such as tax and pension payments, knowledge, and labour skills; social contributions, such as boosting demographic growth; civic contributions, such as voluntary work; and symbolic contributions, such as winning Olympic medals. The findings indicate that contributivist frames are typically advanced by centre-left and progressive parties to justify extending the franchise to immigrants, and are often contrasted with ethno-identitarian views of citizenship. Consequently, this study suggests a shift towards pragmatist arguments and reciprocity-based understandings of contributivism among centre-left parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politics plays a key role when states steer themselves towards becoming low-carbon societies, as parliaments hold the power to guide nations’ activities. This article engages in a longitudinal analysis of parliamentary debates on energy, and identifies how topics emerge, evolve in parallel, and diminish. We used transcripts of plenary debates in Finnish parliament to model topics in energy from 2008 to 2020. We show that debates shift from one focus area to another, and that significant political decisions have been followed by policy-related activities, such as taxation and national strategies guiding energy issues. The idea of renewable energy has become more varied and accepted in political debates, further transforming energy politics, and has been partly incorporated in, and replaced by, the debate on climate change mitigation. Reducing carbon emissions has become a key target of energy transformation, and is likely to stay on the agenda in parliamentary debates on energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how political parties used the federal structure of government for discursive blame attribution strategies in parliamentary debates during the Covid-19 crisis. The analysis focuses on the German case which is considered an embodiment of cooperative federalism. Largely intertwined responsibilities and joint decision making provide incentives for self-serving blame attribution strategies. The empirical investigation includes a qualitative content analysis of 212 parliamentary debates in the Bundestag and the 16 state parliaments. Overall, 2067 statements were manually coded and integrated into a novel dataset. The data reveal a more diverse discursive toolkit of blame attribution strategies than commonly conceptualised. The study demonstrates that parties, especially when they are involved in intergovernmental bodies and coalition governments, resort to 'softer' forms of blaming. The vertical integration of the party system also creates an effective blame barrier, containing self-serving strategies even during the prolonged crisis and several election campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how parliamentary party groups decide who speaks for them on specific issues in parliament. We build on three strands of the literature: the work on the institutional foundations of parliamentary speech; the literature on committee assignments in parliamentary systems which points to different rationales behind parliamentary specialisation and the division of labour; and the literature on issue competition. First, we expect that the party leadership will assign more speaking time on issues that parties 'own' to Members of Parliament (MPs) they favour. Second, we expect an informational rationale regarding the allocation of speaking time by which MPs speak on issues for which they have pre-existing expertise. Third, we expect MPs to speak on issues if they have ties to relevant constituencies outside parliament. We analyse a new data set of all speeches in the Dutch lower house between 1998–2017. The analyses point to the importance of two rationales in the allocation of speaking time: high-status MPs (reflected by their list positions) speak on issues that parties prioritise, and MPs speak on issues on which they have specialised knowledge. Our analyses shed important light on how parliamentary party groups (PPGs) function, specifically how they divide labour within their ranks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radical right populist parties have often been treated as "pariahs," being excluded from coalition politics in parliamentary democracies. We argue that negative rhetoric targeted at radical right populist parties in legislative debates is used by the established parties to distance themselves from such parties and that the incentives to do so depend on the political context. Using sentiment analysis of speeches in the Swedish Riksdag from 2010 to 2022, we find that rhetoric targeted toward the radical right Sweden Democrats is more negative than speech concerning other parties on average. We also find that this negative rhetoric declined over time, particularly from the center-right parties, as the formerly marginal Sweden Democrats gained more seats and became a potential partner for cooperation. Our analysis demonstrates how tracking parliamentary discourse provides insights into changing party dynamics. Our findings suggest that, as the prospects for populists' pariah status change, rhetoric from established parties reflects this shifting role in party politics, with enduring negativity accompanied by reduced hostility among the center-right parties with the greatest potential for cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transcription of parliamentary proceedings is essential for democratic governance. Traditional methods are manual and time-consuming. This work introduces an Automatic Transcription System for the Assembly of the Republic of Portugal (STAAR) that uses an automatic speech recognition model and speaker diarization technologies. STAAR was developed after analyzing existing technologies and the Assembly's specific needs, leading to an effective solution that integrates with current processes. STAAR stands out for its efficiency in transcribing debates and adapting to parliamentary language nuances. It significantly exceeded expectations by presenting a low transcription error rate, ranging from 1.7 to 11.3%, depending on the context and speech style, reducing the time required to produce the official parliamentary debates journal, and improving overall transcription efficiency. Additionally, STAAR enabled the transcription of previously undocumented parliamentary committee meetings, enhancing the documentation of parliamentary activities. This achievement marks a significant step in modernizing parliamentary processes, increasing transparency and accessibility of political information, and positions the Portuguese Parliament at the forefront of technological innovation in parliamentary debates transcription. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The annexation of Crimea, the subsequent insurgency of Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014 and the current full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine have led to different responses from political elites, diasporas and migrants currently residing in different European countries. The historic decision of Sweden to send defence weapons to Ukraine as well as to apply for NATO membership after the invasion in 2022, as compared with mostly ‘soft’ support before, is just one of the examples of this shift. The political role of diasporic and migrant organizations in lobbying for support for Ukraine and sanctions against Russia has also significantly increased: party leaders and high-level politicians are more frequently at the demonstrations for support for Ukraine organized by diasporas. In this article I analyse Swedish Parliamentary debates and arguments for different types of action for Ukraine between 2014 and 2022. I specifically focus on the space occupied by Ukrainian diasporic and migrant individuals/organizations in such debates and arguments.

The covid-19 pandemic and its socioeconomic impacts led to fears that a kind of pandemic-fuelled populism could erupt in crisis-struck societies. Through a content analysis of parliamentary debates on issues dear to populists, we explore the impact of covid-19 on the incidence of populist rhetoric in Portugal in different moments of the pandemic and by different political parties. Our results indicate that, despite an increase of people-centrism during the first covid-19 wave, the pandemic globally decreased the prevalence of populist rhetoric, suggesting that parties’ adoption of populist frames under a crisis may be dependent on the nature of that crisis [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the gender gap in issue attention among members of parliament (MPs) by applying automated text analytic techniques to a novel data set on Italian parliamentary speeches over a remarkably long period (1948–2020). We detect a gendered specialization across issues that tends to disappear as women's shares in parliamentary groups increase. We then investigate whether women's access to previously male-owned issues brings with it a different agenda, operationalized as a different vocabulary. We detect a U-shaped pattern: language gender specificity is high when female MPs are tokens in parliamentary groups with a large preponderance of men; it decreases when their shares start increasing and grows again when they constitute a considerable minority. We argue that this pattern is consistent with the theory of tokenism, and it is produced by the interlinkage of commitment to shared norms and the distribution of "activation thresholds" among female MPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is oppositional behaviour in legislatures gendered? Despite a growing literature on gender and legislative behaviour, there is a conspicuous absence of research on differences between female and male members of parliament (MPs) when it comes to one of the key aspects of parliamentary debates: the voicing of opposition. This article connects the literature on gender and legislative behaviour with opposition scholarship. We examine the role of gender for oppositional behaviour in four legislatures with a focus on debates concerning European Union affairs. Our results show that female MPs generally are equally likely to express opposition as their male colleagues. This result, however, is conditioned by government status. Whilst there is no significant difference between the proportion of opposition expressed by female and male MPs from opposition parties, we find that male MPs representing government parties express more than twice as much opposition as their female colleagues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parliamentary and legislative debate transcripts provide an informative insight into elected politicians' opinions, positions, and policy preferences. They are interesting for political and social sciences as well as linguistics and natural language processing (NLP) research. While exiting research studied individual parliaments, we apply advanced NLP methods to a joint and comparative analysis of six national parliaments (Bulgarian, Czech, French, Slovene, Spanish, and United Kingdom) between 2017 and 2020. We analyze emotions and sentiment in the transcripts from the ParlaMint dataset collection, and assess if the age, gender, and political orientation of speakers can be detected from their speeches. The results show some commonalities and many surprising differences among the analyzed countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on issues of women has largely focused attention on, among others, power asymmetries and gender stereotypes, with less emphasis on positive linguistic mechanisms of women. Drawing on a critical discourse analytical approach and using Ghanaian parliamentary debates as data, this paper examines how female members of parliament (MPs) construct solidarity. The paper finds that, first, Ghanaian female MPs construct solidarity by positioning themselves as agents and the voice of (Ghanaian) women by using the inclusive-we and our/us. Second, the MPs engage in solidarity formation for (Ghanaian) women empowerment by championing the cause of women and calling for female empowerment. Third, the MPs demonstrate solidarity through congratulatory messages that highlight the achievements of (Ghanaian) women. Finally, the MPs resist discourses that discriminate against (Ghanaian) women. This paper highlights the need for marginalized voices to be centred in CDA research and contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on reparative critical practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ParlaMint project, a CLARIN flagship initiative, seeks to standardize the representation of parliamentary data across diverse languages and regions. Version 3.0 of ParlaMint encompasses corpora from 26 European countries and autonomous regions, available for download and search under the CC-BY license. These corpora adhere to a common XML encoding schema, ensuring interoperability. This study evaluates the feasibility of applying the ParlaMint schema to the proceedings of the Parliament of the Republic of South Africa. Through the conversion of a randomly selected parliamentary session, we scrutinize how various elements are modelled, delineating the steps required to initiate a comprehensive encoding endeavour. The experiment starts with data retrieval by downloading Hansard records from the South African Parliament website. An English session was selected to streamline processing for non-South African researchers. The original format consisted of session headers, metadata, introductory messages, and debate records. Speeches were identified by uppercase headers and segmented into paragraphs. Transcript conversion entailed extracting data from the PDF, eliminating technical elements, and ensuring continuity of utterances. Speaker names and functionswere identified, and the sessionwas transformed into ParlaMint-compliant TEI XML format. Meta-comments, including applause, laughter, and interruptions, were categorized based on typical phrases. Quotations, marked with indentation in the original transcript, were manually encoded as TEI elements. Foreign-language fragments were treated as gaps, with English translations provided. Multiparagraph foreign utterances were encoded paragraph by paragraph. Speaker metadata was stored in separate XML files, listing organizations and individual speakers. Speaker names and roles were converted into XML IDs, and web pages were linked for additional information. Speaker type was designated based on metadata, distinguishing between chairs, guests, and regular speakers. The encoded session comprised 95 utterances, with varying distributions among speakers. The proposed conversion process serves as a starting point for the larger endeavour of encoding South African parliamentary data in the ParlaMint schema. While not exhaustive, this study lays the groundwork for expanding the ParlaMint dataset to include African parliamentary records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the significance of perceived threats about dismemberment in Turkish politics, also called the Sèvres syndrome. Relying on a qualitative content analysis of Turkish parliamentary records, it scrutinises how the syndrome influences the debates about Armenians between 1983 and 2018. It demonstrates that Turkish politicians refer to the syndrome in three manners: (1) Armenians had tried to dismember; (2) Armenians could create conditions to dismember again and (3) Armenians are actively attempting to dismember. The study concludes that the syndrome presents an obstacle to a peaceful Turkish–Armenian relationship by recalling Turkish victimhood in the past and relating it to contemporary contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this topos analysis is to identify features of argumentation in Swedish parliamentary debates on asylum policy in 2015 and 2016 compared to German debates. Findings include a focus on procedural rather than substantive aspects and an adaptation of government-like argumentation by cooperating opposition parties. These can be attributed to the focus on consensus and cooperation in Sweden, governed by a minority government, and may be typical of minority governments, common in Scandinavia, in general.

Persistently alive but unaware, vegetative state patients are stuck in the transition between life and death – that is, in a liminal hotspot. This condition raises complex ethical and legal dilemmas concerning end‐of‐life action. Drawing on social representations (SRs) and the liminality framework, our research investigated how the vegetative state was constructed within the Italian parliamentary debates discussing end‐of‐life bills (2009–2017). We aimed to understand (1) how political groups represented the vegetative state, (2) how they legitimised different end‐of‐life bills and (3) came to terms with the issue of liminal hotspots. By dialogically analysing three debates (No. of interventions = 98), we identified six themes and discursive aims allowing parliamentarians to differently represent the vegetative state and support different courses of action. In turn, we identified new features of the psycho‐social processes generating SRs: the dialogical tensions between anchoring and de‐anchoring. Results corroborated the idea that de‐paradoxifying liminality relies on group sense‐making and, thus, different political leanings differently addressed the liminality of the vegetative state. We also reveal a novel feature of dealing with liminal hotspots informing the psycho‐social literature that applies when a decision needs to be taken, such as in the case of crafting a law: moving from the paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the public image of legislative debates is often less than favourable, parliamentary deliberations can be an important indicator of policy preferences, issue saliency and cohesion within political parties. We consider the case of a parliamentary debate that had a considerable long-term political legacy, forging a party system that endured for almost a century. The debates in the Irish parliament over the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty were a critical juncture that split a dominant party, resulting in, first, a civil war and, later, a new mode of party competition. We analyse the text of the debates from this period to see if they contribute to a greater understanding of the ensuing split. Few differences between the two sides in parliament are found, which might explain why few were the differences between the key actors in the party system that evolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, poverty has increasingly been marginalised in Australian policy discourse. One strategy used by social justice advocates to revitalise a poverty policy agenda has been the annual Anti‐Poverty Week campaign, which aims to stimulate community debate around policy innovations to relieve poverty. This paper analyses the Commonwealth parliamentary debates around Anti‐Poverty Week for 10 years from 2012 to 2021. We analyse and compare how politicians from three political parties – the Liberal and National Party Coalition, the Australian Labor Party and The Australian Greens – identified the key statistics for and groups in poverty, their sources of evidence, the consequences of poverty for those affected, the causes of poverty including whether or not disadvantage was linked to wider structural inequities, and the framing of poverty and potential policy solutions. Some conclusions are drawn from these findings about potential strategies for reinvigorating the poverty debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populist language permeates political debate. While much has been said on the shape and colours of populism, less is known on its strategic use. This article offers a diachronic overview (1948–2020) of Italian deputies' strategic use of populist language, by applying a novel dictionary to a new dataset on Italian parliamentary debates. Our analysis shows that populism has no single political colour, as left- and right-wing parties use it to a similar extent. Differently, populist claim-making is used more by parties with demarcationist ideological positions, as it is likely to reinforce the persuasiveness of their in-group/out-group thinking. Finally, it is used less by ruling parties, as their governing status asks them to adopt a more inclusive style of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses parliamentary debates on marriage equality in Germany to understand what factors shape how parties deal with morality politics argumentatively. I argue that the internal divisions of parties and their coalition parties are crucial for the argumentation strategies used in parliamentary debates on morally charged wedge issues. Internally divided parties and parties that must be loyal to coalition partners confronted with internal divisions are likely to employ a discursive avoidance strategy to mitigate the potential for intra‐party and intra‐coalition polarization. To test this empirically, I examine the speeches of the German Bundestag on the Life Partnership Act in 2000 and Marriage for All in 2016 and 2017. The qualitative content analysis confirms my argument: The internally divided CDU and its coalition partners applied avoidance strategies by framing the issue primarily around constitutional principles and using procedural arguments, rather than framing the discourse as an issue of morality politics. Zusammenfassung: Der Artikel analysiert parlamentarische Debatten zur Anerkennung gleichgeschlechtlicher Partnerschaften und Ehen in Deutschland, um zu verstehen, welche Faktoren die Argumentationen von Parteien im Wettbewerb um Moralpolitik beeinflussen. Ich argumentiere, dass die interne Spaltung von Parteien und ihrer Koalitionsparteien entscheidend für die Argumentationsstrategien ist, die in parlamentarischen Debatten über moralisch aufgeladene „wedge issues "verwendet werden. Intern gespaltene Parteien und Parteien, die loyal zu Koalitionspartnern sein müssen, die mit internen Spaltungen konfrontiert sind, verwenden eine diskursive Vermeidungsstrategie, um das Potenzial für eine innerparteiliche und koalitionsinterne Polarisierung abzuschwächen. Das Argument wird anhand einer qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse von Reden von Abgeordneten des Deutschen Bundestages zum Lebenspartnerschaftsgesetz im Jahr 2000 und zur Ehe für Alle im Jahr 2016/2017 bestätigt: Die innerparteilich zerstrittene CDU und ihre Koalitionspartner wendeten Vermeidungsstrategien an, indem sie das Thema in erster Linie in Zusammenhang mit verfassungsrechtlichen Grundsätzen thematisieren und prozedurale Argumente verwendeten, anstatt den Diskurs als eine moralpolitische Frage zu gestalten. Résumé Cet article analyse les débats parlementaires afin de comprendre les facteurs qui façonnent la manière dont les partis traitent la politique morale sur le plan argumentatif. Je soutiens que les divisions au sein des partis et entre les partis d'une coalition représentent un facteur décisif dans les stratégies d'argumentation utilisées dans les débats parlementaires sur les questions morales portant à controverse (« wedge issues »). Les partis divisés en interne et les partis devant rester loyaux envers leurs partenaires de coalition, eux‐mêmes confrontés à des divisions internes, sont susceptibles d'employer une stratégie discursive d'évitement pour atténuer le potentiel de polarisation intra‐parti et intra‐coalition. Pour tester cela empiriquement, j'examine les discours du Bundestag allemand sur la loi relative au partenariat de vie enregistré en 2000 et celle instituant le mariage pour tous en 2016/17. L'analyse qualitative de ces textes confirme mon argument: La CDU, divisée en interne, et ses partenaires de coalition ont appliqué des stratégies d'évitement en abordant la question principalement autour des principes constitutionnels et en utilisant des arguments procéduraux, plutôt que de cadrer le discours comme une question de politique morale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents empirically substantiated answers on the salience of differentiated integration (DI) from the perspective of Croatian governments between 2004 and 2020. Considering DI's relevance for the future of EU integration as well as the fact that DI was de facto adopted by the Croatian governments in order to maintain a healthy relationship with the EU, the main assumption is that DI – as a broad and multifaceted integration phenomenon – appears prominently in the domestic political discourse. By employing text mining and sentiment analysis on a corpus of 376 various governmental documents we answer, do governments talk about DI and specific DI mechanisms at a conceptual level? Which differentiated policy fields do they talk about most often? Our results show that DI has been – and remains – a low salience issue for Croatian governments over the last 15 years, which is surprising considering that over this period, Croatia consolidated its position in the EU in the shadow of the 'polycrisis', also thanks to DI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary relevance of Adam Smith is evidenced by continued reference to his name. Computational analysis identifies over 700 mentions of Smith and his two famous works— The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations —in post-World War 1 House of Commons debates. We find some parliamentarians appreciate Smith's complex ideas, but most references are 'ornamental'. Charting Smith's use over the decades, this paper builds on Kirk Willis' idea that studying parliamentary debates are an ideal way to understand how, at best, policy ideas, germinate and disseminate over time, or, at worst, how 'complex ideas became slogans'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the use case of parliamentary debates as part of Digital Humanities. First, the ParlaMint project is outlined as a flagship initiative of CLARIN ERIC infrastructure. The project makes content from the national and regional parliaments visible, comparable and accessible for policy making and research. Then, the approaches are considered that have been applied in the creation of 31 corpora from national and regional parliaments. Last but not least, the utility of the multilingual resource is discussed.

This study offers a comprehensive, in-depth analysis of Slovak illiberal anti-gender parliamentary discourse based on a unique dataset consisting of 85 parliamentary speeches. It presents who the main actors are in terms of the illiberal anti-gender discourse in Slovakia and which narratives they postulate. It also considers if there is any variation in the identified narratives. The qualitative content analysis covered several critical anti-gender narratives in the rhetoric of illiberal parties. I argue that the occurrence and range of anti-gender narratives within the Slovak parliamentary illiberal discourse are diverse, and this diversity varies in the ideological background of the analysed parties. While some of the more traditional Christian conservative parties, such as the KDH, and new populist parties such as OĽaNO or Sme Rodina, have articulated gender primarily as a threat to Slovak Catholics, Christianity, traditional marriage, and families, others like the nationally conservative-oriented SNS or the Smer-SD have stressed the loss of national sovereignty and legal aspects around the Istanbul Convention, and utilized this topic to strengthen their Eurosceptic rhetoric. Finally, the far-right K-ĽSNS has used an eclectic approach combining all found anti-gender narratives while using the most abusive language towards transgender persons and other sexual minorities.

The European Union’s climate policy is considered quite ambitious. This has led to a growing interest among political scientists investigating the European Parliament’s ability to negotiate such ambitious climate legislation. These studies generally focus on the voting behaviour of members of the European Parliament, which allows us to know more about their positions when it comes to accepting or rejecting legislative acts. However, we know surprisingly little about how they debate and justify their positions in Parliament. In these debates, members of the European Parliament not only identify the problem (i.e., climate change and its adverse effects) but also discuss potential solutions (i.e., their willingness or ambition to fight and adapt to climate change). In addition, plenary debates are ideal for making representative claims based on citizens’ interests on climate action. Therefore, this article aims to understand how climate policy ambitions are debated in the European Parliament and whose interests are represented. We propose a new manual coding scheme for climate policy ambitions in parliamentary debate and employ it in climate policy debates in the ninth European Parliament (2019–present). In doing so, this article makes a methodological contribution to operationalising climate policy ambition from a parliamentary representation and legitimation perspective. We find debating patterns that connect quite detailed ambitions with clear representative claims and justifications. There is more agreement on what to do than how to get there, with divides emerging based on party, ideological, and member-state characteristics.

This article introduces the Hansard at Huddersfield web application, which allows users to make a range of different searches of the Hansard data (1803–2021) and which draws on the insights of corpus linguistics (CL) and visualization techniques to appeal to researchers from backgrounds where these approaches are relatively underused. The web application aims to be accessible and includes advice on interpreting the results of searches as well as always allowing the user to access the original Hansard text. This article explains the scope and functionality of the site as well as its architecture, and gives example uses of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations far beyond traditional academic institutions have become prolific science producers, with many now providing evidence‐based advice for national governments and policy‐makers. Neo‐institutional sociology explains organizations' growing investment in research activities and research‐based policy advice by the all‐embracing scientization and the expansion of the educated population, phenomena observable throughout the world. There is, however, considerably less knowledge about how the organizations' increased knowledge production and the supply of science‐based policy advice are reflected in national policy‐making, including the legislative work of parliaments, and to what extent distinct organizations are deemed authoritative in different countries. In this paper, we examine how different organizations are used as scientific authorities in parliamentary debates over new legislation. Drawing on analyses of 576 parliamentary debates from Australia, Finland, Kenya, and the United Kingdom, we study what organizations are acknowledged as scientific authorities and the relative weight of different organization types in the context of political debates over new legislation. The results reveal that while organizations in general are frequently evoked as scientific authorities in all four countries, there is remarkable variation in the types of organizations considered authoritative in different national contexts. We elaborate these findings by analysing ways in which politicians evaluate organizations as sources of scientific authority. While the same set of evaluative schemas are used in all four countries, each is typically applied to certain types of organization. The results suggest that both the supply of scientific policy advice and political culture shape legislators' rhetorical practices when drawing on organizations' scientific authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of the discursive aspect of populism have tended to focus on the rhetorical manifestations of populist discourses, namely how populist politicians 'talk politics'. However, scant attention has been devoted to how politicians rhetorically characterise the concept of populism itself. This article investigates a corpus (N = 4.835) of parliamentary debates in Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, to assess the different definitions of populism used by politicians and explain any variations found. Results show that the ways that politicians describe populism vary cross-nationally in terms of topics, adjectives and targets. A more positive attitude towards populism is likely for politicians who express anti-elitism and opposition to multiculturalism and corruption, regardless of the topic under discussion. Moreover, the effect of political ideology on politicians' attitudes towards populism is more pronounced when economic topics are under discussion. Discussing these findings, this study offers interesting implications for the literature on populism, parliamentary affairs, party politics and text analysis. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.2013655. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success and longevity of coalition governments depends on the ability to keep conflicts between coalition members at bay. The risk of such conflicts is often assessed by drawing on proxy measures, such as the ideological heterogeneity among government parties. This article presents a new approach to measuring the atmosphere between government parties. The 'coalition mood' is a time-varying measure that draws on applause patterns between coalition partners during legislative debates. The article exemplifies the measurement approach based on automated analyses of over 105,000 plenary debates in Germany and Austria. The article then assesses the measure's face, concurrent and predictive validity. It finds the measure well aligned with qualitative evidence, shows that the coalition mood is correlated with poll ratings of the government parties and helps to predict the duration of legislative processes. The conclusion highlights future applications of the coalition mood for research on coalition politics and public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2021, the Conservative UK government announced a proposal to introduce mandatory voter identification (ID) in elections, raising concerns around how these measures might disenfranchise already marginalised groups. Using computational content analysis techniques, this study analyses all parliamentary debates to date on voter ID to understand how political elites frame these requirements. Despite voter ID being justified as necessary to tackle voter fraud when the new Elections Bill was first announced, this study instead finds both Conservative and Labour Members of Parliament agree voter fraud numbers are small. Conservatives nevertheless significantly frame voter ID as necessary to strengthen public confidence in the electoral system, which contrasts Electoral Commission's 2021 data instead finding 90% of the public consider voting to be safe from fraud at the polling station. Overall, this study sheds light to the 'framing contest' and polarisation present in parliamentary debates about voter ID, an increasingly contentious issue of the proposed Elections Bill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study offers a comprehensive, in-depth analysis of Slovak illiberal anti-gender parliamentary discourse based on a unique dataset consisting of 85 parliamentary speeches. It presents who the main actors are in terms of the illiberal anti-gender discourse in Slovakia and which narratives they postulate. It also considers if there is any variation in the identified narratives. The qualitative content analysis covered several critical anti-gender narratives in the rhetoric of illiberal parties. I argue that the occurrence and range of anti-gender narratives within the Slovak parliamentary illiberal discourse are diverse, and this diversity varies in the ideological background of the analysed parties. While some of the more traditional Christian conservative parties, such as the KDH, and new populist parties such as OĽaNO or Sme Rodina, have articulated gender primarily as a threat to Slovak Catholics, Christianity, traditional marriage, and families, others like the nationally conservative-oriented SNS or the Smer-SD have stressed the loss of national sovereignty and legal aspects around the Istanbul Convention, and utilized this topic to strengthen their Eurosceptic rhetoric. Finally, the far-right K-ĽSNS has used an eclectic approach combining all found anti-gender narratives while using the most abusive language towards transgender persons and other sexual minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union's climate policy is considered quite ambitious. This has led to a growing interest among political scientists investigating the European Parliament's ability to negotiate such ambitious climate legislation. These studies generally focus on the voting behaviour of members of the European Parliament, which allows us to know more about their positions when it comes to accepting or rejecting legislative acts. However, we know surprisingly little about how they debate and justify their positions in Parliament. In these debates, members of the European Parliament not only identify the problem (i.e., climate change and its adverse effects) but also discuss potential solutions (i.e., their willingness or ambition to fight and adapt to climate change). In addition, plenary debates are ideal for making representative claims based on citizens' interests on climate action. Therefore, this article aims to understand how climate policy ambitions are debated in the European Parliament and whose interests are represented. We propose a new manual coding scheme for climate policy ambitions in parliamentary debate and employ it in climate policy debates in the ninth European Parliament (2019-present). In doing so, this article makes a methodological contribution to operationalising climate policy ambition from a parliamentary representation and legitimation perspective. We find debating patterns that connect quite detailed ambitions with clear representative claims and justifications. There is more agreement on what to do than how to get there, with divides emerging based on party, ideological, and member-state characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on metaphors being employed for clarificatory purposes in British parliamentary debates. Topics include Parliamentary debates typically involving an exchange of arguments concerning complex issues such as taxation and welfare; and Debbonaire inviting the committee members for using the knowledge of visiting a cinema in better understanding the services involved in providing online pornographic content.

The current paper explores the relation between deliberation, political legitimization and decision making in educational policy in the aftermath of the intervention by the troika in Portugal in 2011. Centring on political debates about equal opportunities in education in the Portuguese parliament, it explores how arguments, such as 'crisis' and 'change', were employed to frame – and covertly promote – a concession of sovereignty to international organizations and legitimize a turn in policy-making to an austerity doctrine regarding education policies. Findings reveal the interplay between a loose and polyphonic discourse of international organizations, and the construction of a narrative of failure regarding educational policies previously adopted, recontextualized and thus enabled the change towards neoliberal policies in Portuguese education policies, bringing about a leaner concept of equal opportunities in education at the national level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the 1st October 2017 an independence referendum was organised in Catalonia. The aim of this paper is to analyse the nature of the political debate going on in the Catalan Parliament during the whole process by focusing on the kind of argumentation strategies that were used by each of the leanings to legitimise their political decisions. We do that relying on a methodological distinction that differentiates between sound argumentation and fallacious argumentation. By using a Critical Discourse Analysis approach, this study offers a wide picture of the kind of argumentation used by the main political actors involved in the process of decision making in Catalonia. The results show that there is more emphasis in antagonising with the others, than engaging in sound argument exchange that could facilitate minimal points of consensus. Such results may help explain why the Catalan conflict is still unsolved at the political level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces an integrative and comprehensive method for the linguistic annotation of parliamentary discourse. Initially conceived as documentation for a specific and small-scale research project, the annotation scheme takes into account national specificities and is geared to proposing an annotation scheme that is both highly standardized and adaptable to other research contexts. In this paper we present a specific application of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) framework applied to a subset of official transcripts of plenary proceedings in three parliamentary cultures. The TEI annotation scheme proposed here has two main applications: first, it serves as a basis for encoding parliamentary corpora by providing a systematic way of annotating both elements within the text (e.g., turns, incidents, and interruptions) and the metadata associated with it (e.g., variables pertaining to the speaker or the speech event); second, it provides a cross-linguistic empirical basis for further annotation projects.

This paper contributes to the very up-to-date topic of conspiracy theory. The main goal of this study is to analyse the main 'anti-Soros' narratives within Slovak parliamentary discourse. Due to qualitative content analysis, based on N=84 parliamentary speeches and comments, the author detected four main narratives that included several conspiracies. Four concrete narratives: (1) influence on Slovak politics; (2) delegitimisation of political opponents; (3) the anti-Semitic conspiracy ground; (4) the supporter and organiser have instrumentalised George Soros to their rhetoric while combining classical conspiracies narratives. The final narrative (5) condemnation of anti-Soros rhetoric, which represents de facto only founded counter-narrative and was significantly minor. In this context, and keeping in mind that anti-Soros discourse was four times bigger than the discourse condemning the use of this rhetoric, the author argues that the continuance of this dividing verbiage based on legitimising conspiracies could contribute to further polarising Slovak politics and society. On the other hand, the popularity of conspiracy theories must lead social scientists to (re)think even more about the mainstream discourses created over the last thirty years, which conspiracy narratives naturally oppose. It should also lead to examining the actors who set the principles and boundaries of mainstream discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper presents a diachronic corpus linguistic approach to the conceptualisation and framing of 'risk' in German parliamentary discourse. We analyse all occurrences of risk based on the complete collection of plenary protocols of the German Bundestag covering the legislative periods 1–18 (1949–2017). We apply methods used in Digital Discourse Analysis to show how the concept of 'risk' changes through time. Therefore, we investigate co-occurrences to find typical collocations and contexts. We measured three peaks: the first in the late 1950s, the second from the 1970s onwards, and the third in the first decade of the new millennium. We show that 'risk' as a negative and 'chance' as a positive concept have partly taken the communicative place of 'danger' and 'possibility'. The collocates of risk that can be related to different knowledge domains increase until 2009. This hints at the growing importance of risk thematizations in more and more thematic contexts. Technology and economics turn out to be the most important of these contexts. The analysis shows a clear tendency towards a negative and rather generic use of the word risk. Our results provide for the first time a data-driven insight into the long-term development of the 'risk' concept in political discourse of the Federal Republic of Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs the concept of respectability and the discursive representation of gender equality policies to discuss how surrogacy is represented in Nordic parliamentary debates and policy documents. The article's objective is to study how respectability, problems and equality are represented and discursively and rhetorically produced through a comparative study of Finnish and Norwegian political discourses on domestic unpaid surrogacy and cross-border commercial surrogacy. The article uses rhetorical and discursive analysis to analyse the Finnish and Norwegian Parliaments' bills, members' initiatives and proceedings from 2002 to 2018. Finland's policy on surrogacy has evolved from an unregulated and permissive approach towards a more restrictive one, with discourses focusing on medicalisation, equality, altruism and safety concerning domestic surrogacy and problems and risks concerning cross-border surrogacy. Norway's policy on surrogacy has been restrictive consistently, with discourses focusing on surrogacy as a transnational social problem involving exploitation of women and children, and biocentrism. Analysing surrogacy regulation in Nordic welfare states, the author concludes that policies and parliamentary debates in both countries have expressed expectations for inclusive health policies and social security for families. Cross-border surrogacy is characterised as an unwanted consequence of globalisation and marketisation of reproduction. Surrogate mothers' respectability is constructed through rhetoric on differences in terms of nationality, class and binary representations of female caring and instrumentalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blame games between governing and opposition parties are a characteristic feature of domestic politics. In the EU, policymaking authority is shared among multiple actors across different levels of governance. How does EU integration affect the dynamics of domestic blame games? Drawing on the literatures on EU politicisation and blame attribution in multi-level governance systems, we derive expectations about the direction and frequency of blame attributions in a Europeanized setting. We argue, first, that differences in the direction and frequency of blame attributions by governing and opposition parties are shaped by their diverging baseline preferences as blame avoiders and blame generators; secondly, we posit that differences in blame attributions across Europeanized policies are shaped by variation in political authority structures, which incentivize certain attributions while constraining others. We hypothesize, inter alia, that blame games are “Europeanized” primarily by governing parties and when policy-implementing authority rests with EU-level actors. We test our theoretical expectations by analysing parliamentary debates on EU asylum system policy and EU border control policy in Austria and Germany.

Recent controversies in the literature on the electoral effects of cash transfer programs reveal the limitations of traditional models associating public policies to voting. Why would beneficiaries reward parties for programmatic policies when the government has no control over the distribution of the benefits? Are they guided by short-term retrospective voting in favor of the incumbent without forming durable links? By studying the Brazilian case, based on the Bolsa Escola-Program, formulated by the PSDB, and the Bolsa-Família Program, formulated by the PT, I test different theories and propose an alternative approach. My thesis is that the long-term electoral effect of programmatic policies is a consequence of credit-claiming efforts made by the competing parties, resulting in reciprocity from voters. My argument is built on the examination of parliamentary deliberations throughout the formulation of these programs and on the analysis of public opinion surveys conducted in 2005, a transitional moment when there were beneficiaries of both programs, and in 2018, the year of the first presidential election with the Bolsa-Família Program being implemented with the PT as an opposition party. The data show that party leaders came to the defense of these social programs to varying degrees and in different moments of their terms in office and that these different mobilization strategies reflected on voting behavior.

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This article will explore the differing attitudes among British parliamentarians towards the use of German soldiers in 1756 and 1776. Utilising speech act theory, it will be shown that German soldiers were constructed as mercenaries in 1776 because they were being employed to fight against British subjects – the North American colonists. However, when nearly identical German soldiers were employed to fight against a French adversary in 1756, they were not constructed as mercenaries. It will be concluded that the mercenary as a figure of war is not a static, transhistorical concept with universal characteristics. Rather, the mercenary is socially constructed, and, as such, is only made possible in specific historical and socio-political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on discourses on populism, presenting a case study on the United Kingdom. Analysing all references to populism in the British Parliament from 1970 to 2018, this article provides a framework to think about rhetoric and populism, a method to investigate political attitudes, and insights about the debate on populism in the United Kingdom. Results show that from the 1970s to the 1990s politicians interpret populism in demagogical terms and most often refer to the category of the political role of 'the people'. More recently, negative references and personal attacks increase, and politicians refer to different categories. Moreover, the analysis shows how British politicians employ epideictic and forensic rhetorical strategies more often when debating about populism, whereas deliberative strategies rarely emerge. Finally, the investigation over the 2015–2018 period shows that government membership, a distant election, and a right-wing party membership increase the likelihood of rhetorical positive interpretations of populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an interdisciplinary comparison of British and German legal arguments concerning the justification of the use of force against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). It is situated in the broader framework of research on strategic culture and the use of international law as a tool for justifying state behaviour. Thus, a gap in political science research is analysed: addressing legal arguments as essentially political in their usage. The present work questions whether differing strategic cultures will lead to a different use of legal arguments. International legal theory and content analysis are combined to sort arguments into the categories of instrumentalism, formalism and natural law. To do so, a data set consisting of all speeches with regard to the fight against ISIS made in both parliaments until the end of 2018 is analysed. It is shown that Germany and the UK, despite their varying strategic cultures, rely on similar legal justifications to a surprisingly large extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to certain peculiarities of actualization of speech strategies in the genre of parliamentary debates in the Republic of South Ossetia. Parliamentary debates is a genre of political discourse which functions as an integral macro unit of discourse due to realization of a number of strategies, among which the most prominent are: incentive to reciprocal reaction, the use of well-founded metaphorical expressions ,intensification of statements. The analysis of factual material discloses the fact that speech techniques showing discursive characteristics of south ossetian parliamentary communication are peculiar to parliamentary discourse as a whole. At the same time the analysis of parliamentary debates in the parliament of RSO helped to reveal specific features of the national political discourse, which is an institutional type of communication, taking place in an ethnic-based register of intercourse. We can point to use of questions in the 3rd person singular on the present topic meant for discovering new information, use of orientation and biological metaphors, personification, (de)intensifiers, downtowners, modal verbs. Metaphoric tone of speech occurs in emotional speech acts mostly. The aim of all these strategies is to reach a definite goal, to draw attention of listeners to the most significant questions on the agenda, propose personal analysis of the current situation, try to criticize the opponent in a polite manner, avoid conflict, make an evasive answer.