Institutionalization of political parties in the parliaments of Central Europe – data mining of parliamentary debates

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.

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.

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.