Ģ��ֱ��

Academy of Finland Professor Project: Political Representation - Tensions between Parliament and the People from the Age of Revolutions to the 21st Century

All democratic (and many non-democratic) states rely on representative government in one form or another. Hence, the tension between parliament and the people is central to the process of defining how political decision-making should work. Our international and multidisciplinary team conducts a pioneering investigation into parliamentary legitimacy, political representation, and popular sovereignty. The project produces a synthesising monograph, exploring the evolution of parliamentary sovereignty and representation in Northwest Europe in the last 250 years, considering past fragmentations of representation that remind us of our own today. Our research team adopts an empirical and language-sensitive approach to political history, analysing debates in national parliaments. Computer-assisted analyses of the extensive corpora of digitised parliamentary records from Britain, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden are used to locate confrontations on representation and popular sovereignty, some of which have previously gone unnoticed. Such uses of comparative analysis and big data have only become possible in the 2020s. Our contextualising close reading of micro-level cases focuses on the dynamic relationship between intra- and extra-parliamentary political discourses in both national contexts and cross-national transfers. 

Six interlinked work packages address methodology, four key historical periods and the topic as a whole: WP1 Comparative big data analysis of political speech; WP2 From representation by estates to representation by the nation, 1760s-1860s; WP3 Pressures to democratise parliamentary representation, 1860s-1920; WP4 From crisis to the consolidation of national democracy, 1920-1990; WP5 The dislocation of nations, peoples and ideologies as challenges to representation, 1990-2020; WP6 Two monographs and an edited anthology on the overall theme.

Through the research approach to political history developed within Jyväskylä Quantitative Conceptual History Group, the project uses data-driven yet contextually sensitive text mining methods that enable systematic analyses of big data. Quantitative onomasiological and semasiological text-mining points at patterns of diachronic change in discourses and helps to locate datasets for qualitative contextualising analysis as well as reveals (a)synchronicities and transfers between various forums and nations. Our conclusions can thereby rely on both contextualising analysis and quantification.