ongoing
Institutionalization of political parties in the parliaments of Central Europe – data mining of parliamentary debates
principal investigator / project leader
Ph.D. / Assistant Professor
Sociologist and political scientist
Full bio project value: PLN 713,916
funding source: National Science Center
discipline: political and administrative sciences
location: Warsaw
duration: 2020 2021 2022 2023
How do new topics become a source of political conflict? How has the understanding of democracy changed over time? Can you predict which parties will fall quickly and which will become important political actors? The project, led by Dr. Agnieszka Kwiatkowska, aims to analyse the process of institutionalization of political parties in parliaments of five Central European countries (Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Slovakia and Hungary) using quantitative methods of analysing textual data (parliamentary debates) and numerical data (roll-call votes) on an innovative database that will be created in the project.
RESEARCH PROJECT
Institutionalization of political parties in the parliaments of Central Europe
data mining of parliamentary debates
Research Unit
Grant AmountPLN 713,916
Funding Source
Duration of Research Project: 2020–2024
How do new topics become a source of political conflict? How has the understanding of democracy changed over time? Can you predict which parties will fall quickly and which will become important political actors? The project, led by Dr. Agnieszka Kwiatkowska, aims to analyse the process of institutionalization of political parties in parliaments of five Central European countries (Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Slovakia and Hungary), by using quantitative methods of analysing textual data (parliamentary debates) and numerical data (roll-call votes) on an innovative database that will be created in the project.
Project Description
The institutionalization of political parties is a process of continuous, dynamic adaptation and stabilization resulting in a shift from loose, spontaneous initiatives to more organized modes of collective action. In the project, we plan to analyse how internal institutionalization (consistency in parliamentary speeches, personal stability, internal divisions) and external one (influence on other parties in the parliament) affect the party's durability and its ability to survive.
Project Methodology
The methodological objective of the project is to evaluate the existing methods of determining the ideological positions of parliamentarians and parliamentary clubs and to create new methods for the simultaneous analysis of parliamentary debates and roll-call votes, taking into account the micro level variables (metadata on parliamentarians and debates) and the macro level (concerning the party system). The use of a variety of statistical techniques and machine learning methods to classify, analyse relationships, and reduce the dimensionality of data will increase the accuracy of analysis and prediction of parliamentary behaviour and the activities of parliamentary clubs.
By researching parliamentary debates in five countries, we want to find out what factors determine a survival of a new party or its collapse or a takeover by another party. We will learn how the party's cohesion and identity are expressed in parliamentary statements, as well as what characterizes the process of institutionalization of party systems in Central and Eastern Europe.
Kwiatkowska, Agnieszka
Principal Investigator
Role in the Faculty
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Role in the Department
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Role in the Institute
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Role in the Research Center
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Specialization
Sociologist and political scientist
Academic degree or title
Ph.D. / Assistant Professor
Email
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First and last name
Agnieszka Kwiatkowska
Ph.D. / Assistant Professor Agnieszka KwiatkowskaSociologist and political scientist
Expected impact of the project
The project's innovation is based on the simultaneous analysis of parliamentary debates and votes as well as political metadata at the micro and macro levels. The data will be analysed in a comparative perspective, taking into account macro variables, in order to identify effects that are universal in nature. As no previous analyses of this type exist, the project is innovative in theoretical and empirical terms, and its results will enrich Polish and world science in the field of research on parliamentary elites and party systems. Another important contribution to the development of the research field and the scientific discipline will be the creation of a unique database.
Research Team
Viktoriia Muliavka
sociologist,
researches political protests and specializes in comparative multilevel analysis
Amanda Dziubińska
political scientist, researches issues of the CEE, interested in comparative constitutionalism and philosophy of politics
Hubert Plisiecki
psychologist, interested in NLP, identifying QRP, and quantitative research