Objective This project will examine how partisan and electoral institutions influence parliamentary debates. Despite its importance in the democratic process, parliamentary debate has received less attention than voting, the other primary form of legislative activity. While elections in the EU and in member states increasingly demonstrate voters' disenchantment with politics, it is unknown how various communication channels between politicians and voters actually work. This includes parliamentary debates as the most visible of these channels. The project will draw upon institutional theories of legislative politics to study the strategic nature of political communication and collect new data on legislative debate participation and content in national parliaments (Germany and the UK) and in the European Parliament. In addition, it will employ novel quantitative text-analytic methods to evaluate the data and build upon the methodological arsenal developed in computational linguistics in order to estimate legislators' positions from speeches. This project aims at generating new insights into the institutional foundations of democratic debate participation and content in parliaments, expanding the scope of the questions explored in previous studies on parliamentary deliberation and comparative institutional analysis of legislatures, and at establishing interdisciplinary linkages between political science and computational linguistics. In addition, this project will lead to new research tools for the analysis of political speech. Fields of science social sciencespolitical sciencespolitical communicationhumanitieslanguages and literaturelinguisticssocial sciencespolitical sciencespolitical transitionselections Keywords European Union comparative politics electoral systems legislative debates parliamentary institutions political science quantitative text analysis Programme(s) FP7-PEOPLE - Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013) Topic(s) PEOPLE-2007-4-3.IRG - Marie Curie Action: "International Reintegration Grants" Call for proposal FP7-PEOPLE-IRG-2008 See other projects for this call Funding Scheme MC-IRG - International Re-integration Grants (IRG) Coordinator UNIVERSITAET MANNHEIM EU contribution € 75 000,00 Address SCHLOSS 68161 Mannheim Germany See on map Region Baden-Württemberg Karlsruhe Mannheim, Stadtkreis Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Administrative Contact Kerstin Frenzel Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Total cost No data