Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PresentingParliament (Presenting Parliament: Parliamentarians' visions of the communication and role of parliament within the mediated democracies of Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands, 1844-1995)
Berichtszeitraum: 2020-10-01 bis 2022-09-30
The concept of a ‘personalization of politics’ suggests that media attention has increasingly focused on personalities such as ministers at the cost of institutions, yet paradoxically parliaments have maintained media visibility. While researchers have studied the relation between media and executive leaders or political parties, there is little scholarship on how parliaments as collectives have communicated to the public. However, democracy fails if citizens cannot see the functioning of their representative body, so parliaments have sought to show their work publicly. This project has investigated how they tried to do so, and has thereby demonstrated the important role that parliaments played in the ‘mediatization of politics’. Specifically, it investigated: (1) which arguments parliamentarians voiced against parliament’s use of new means of communication; (2) how and why parliamentarians wanted to use new media to communicate parliament to the public; and (3) how parliamentarians envisioned the role of parliament within a (mass) mediated democracy. The method was a longitudinal and comparative analysis of parliamentary debates on parliament’s engagements with new media – the mass press, radio, television and internet – in Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands between 1844 and 1995. Debates were found with OCR in the hitherto undigitized parliamentary proceedings of these countries, and were analyzed using the topic modelling method and the newly designed ‘structural collocation analysis’ method. Relevant topics were then selected for qualitative analysis. Dissemination of results occurred through publications, seminar and conference presentations, and teaching. The host institution Lund University provided international expertise and resources on the history of media-political systems, and the secondments at Leiden University and the Centre for Parliamentary History in the Netherlands offered additional perspectives, archives, and research networks related to parliamentary history. Overall, the project management experience and teacher certification enabled the researcher to become an autonomous academic. For more details on the conclusions of the action, please see the main results section below.
The research yielded a plethora of different arguments over time on whether, and how, parliaments should use new forms of media to (re)establish parliament at the centre of democracy in mass media societies. In exploring parliamentarians’ media tactics, I discovered the central role played in these debates by divisions between political parties; government and the opposition; front and back benchers; and MPs from urban and rural constituencies. The high level of reflexivity among these groups on how the mediating of parliament would affect them differently was accentuated. Institutions usually strategize about their tactics internally; parliaments were unique in that their media strategies focused on mediating those tactical discussions publicly. Parliaments debate rather than implement, and are inherently divided between individual parliamentarians and political parties with conflicting objectives. This internal division has made it difficult for parliaments to communicate to the outside world with a single voice. The essence of parliament is in fact its multiplicity of voices – its main function is communicative as a forum of national debate. Consequently, I discovered a dialectic between parliamentarians’ individual media tactics and parliament’s institutional media strategy. Overall, the results highlight tactics: (1) parliamentarians’ media tactics were treated as the lower-level components of the higher-level institutional media strategies of parliaments; and (2) the ‘bottom-up’ media tactics of the comparatively ‘powerless’ individual parliamentarians’ (who lacked an institutional PR apparatus) were juxtaposed vis-à-vis the ‘top-down’ media strategies of the ‘powerful’ governments (which disposed of an institutional PR apparatus). Surprising results finally included the high prevalence of temporal and transnational learning curves: parliamentarians observed how other parliaments used media in Europe and beyond (notably the US, Canada, and Australia, but also for example Uganda); and parliamentarians in their argumentation frequently invoked parliaments’ experiences with earlier forms of media (how parliaments had used the press, radio, television in the past). To reach these results, I cleaned and enriched a corpus of digitised parliamentary proceedings together with a research engineer at the host institution, which has been made publicly available on the data storage platform Zenodo. We applied the digital method of topic modelling to this corpus. We also used the corpus to innovate with our new method of ‘structural collocation analysis’, in which we compared interventions by subgroups of MPs using meta data that we had added to the digitised proceedings. Results were exploited and disseminated through presentations, seminars, invited talks, conferences, teaching, publications, outreach activities, and (social) media.
I progressed beyond the state of the art in two important ways. First, I showed how parliamentarians’ arguments on mediating parliament and its role in a media society were significantly determined by their individual and group identities (partisanship, government-opposition, seniority, and geography). Second, I demonstrated that debates on mediating parliament did not occur in isolation: parliamentarians actively looked both to the past for precedents, and abroad to see how other parliaments were using media to communicate their work to the democratic citizenry.
Together with the Swedish research engineer Mathias Johansson of the Lund University DigitalHistory@Lund Research Platform, I also developed a new method entitled ‘Structural Collocation Analysis’ for the analysis of digitised big data.
The research can help to inform current debates and policymaking on parliamentary reform and how parliaments can stay central in modern mass mediated democracies. The earlier experiences that parliaments had with using new forms of mass media to communicate parliamentary work to citizens can help us rethink how parliaments should continue to inform the public, and how they can keep doing so effectively in the future with the advent of new communication technologies. In today’s competitive attention economy, parliaments struggle to stay visible, and this research on parliamentary media usage can help in this struggle.
The constructed database of cleaned, processed, and enriched parliamentary proceedings with meta data (available on the public Zenodo platform) can be used by other researchers and policymakers. The newly developed method of ‘structural collocation analysis’, which Mathias and I are publishing two journal articles on, can also benefit future research.
Overall, the research contributes to the European Union’s Horizon 2020 emphases on truly representative parliaments, ‘evolving European media landscapes’, and ‘boosting civic and democratic engagement’.
There are four potential users of the research results: (1) academic scholars; (2) university students; (3) policymakers; and (4) the public.
Together with the Swedish research engineer Mathias Johansson of the Lund University DigitalHistory@Lund Research Platform, I also developed a new method entitled ‘Structural Collocation Analysis’ for the analysis of digitised big data.
The research can help to inform current debates and policymaking on parliamentary reform and how parliaments can stay central in modern mass mediated democracies. The earlier experiences that parliaments had with using new forms of mass media to communicate parliamentary work to citizens can help us rethink how parliaments should continue to inform the public, and how they can keep doing so effectively in the future with the advent of new communication technologies. In today’s competitive attention economy, parliaments struggle to stay visible, and this research on parliamentary media usage can help in this struggle.
The constructed database of cleaned, processed, and enriched parliamentary proceedings with meta data (available on the public Zenodo platform) can be used by other researchers and policymakers. The newly developed method of ‘structural collocation analysis’, which Mathias and I are publishing two journal articles on, can also benefit future research.
Overall, the research contributes to the European Union’s Horizon 2020 emphases on truly representative parliaments, ‘evolving European media landscapes’, and ‘boosting civic and democratic engagement’.
There are four potential users of the research results: (1) academic scholars; (2) university students; (3) policymakers; and (4) the public.