15:00 - 16:40
P14
Room:
Room: South Hall 2A
Panel Session 14
Jeremias Nieminen - Intra-party polarization in parliamentary speech
Lasse Laustsen - Preferences for Leaders’ Personality Traits in Times of Conflict and Peace
Sergi Ferrer - The political consequences of candidate polarization: Quasi-experimental evidence from two-round elections
Intra-party polarization in parliamentary speech
P14-1
Presented by: Jeremias Nieminen
Jeremias Nieminen 1, Salla Simola 2, Janne Tukiainen 1, 3
1 University of Turku
2 Storytel
3 VATT Institute for Economic Research
We study intra-party polarization of parliamentary speech in Finland over a long time period of more than 100 years (1907-2018) using automated text analysis and the polarization measure introduced in Gentzkow et al. (2019). In addition to estimating intra-party polarization, we describe demographics of Finnish MPs over time, and how the share of speech by different demographic groups has evolved in the Finnish parliament during the last century. We find significant polarization by gender and university education but no polarization by age, white-collar job, Helsinki and Uusimaa region, or first-term MP status.