The evolution of party unity: Do politicians follow the party line or voice their own opinions?
Name of applicant
Nicholas Buhmann-Holmes
Title
PhD Fellow
Institution
Roskilde University
Amount
DKK 450,000
Year
2024
Type of grant
Internationalisation Fellowships
What?
This project develops a new approach to study whether members of parliament have become more or less likely to follow the party line. Moreover, it builds a new theory which can explain why parliamentarians act as they do. Finally, to develop this new approach, the project builds a new data set that shows all Danish parliamentary debates from the early 20th century until today.
Why?
If we want to know how well our democracy functions compared to previous periods, we need to know whether members of parliament can voice their own opinions, or whether they are more likely to merely follow the party line. That is what this project can show.
How?
The project builds an original data set made up of all Danish parliamentary (Folketinget) speeches since the early 20th century. While using state of the art quantitative text analysis methods, I employ a new theoretical framework to investigate whether parliamentarians have become more or less likely to go against the party line.