Martin Søyland

• Søyland, Martin (2022). Party Control and Responsiveness: How MPs Use Variation in Lower-Level Institutional Design as an Electoral Responsiveness Mechanism. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. ISSN 1613-0073. 3133. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Different parliamentary activities allow Members of Parliament (MPs) varying amounts of autonomy. Previous studies have shown that, in parliamentary systems with strong parties and party-centered electoral rules, MPs have limited room for crossing the party line in the legislature both in voting and speech. Further, party-centered systems limit MP’s ability to address electoral concerns of their constituency; they are less responsive. In this paper, I combine these findings by showing that even within system variation in party control over institutions affects the levels of responsiveness in parliamentary questions. By linking MP’s constituency mentions with different types of questions, my results show that the institutional design in the Norwegian Storting affects the level of MP constituency signaling. Specifically, I show that questions with low levels of party control and public attention (written questions and question time) give MPs far more opportunity to raise constituency specific issues than the more party controlled activities (interpellations and question hours). Consequently, I argue that responsiveness does not disappear in party-centered systems; it is located at lower-level institutions. Particularly, some types of questions, where shirking from the party line is less consequential and the party organizations have less control over its members, allow for constituency signaling.

• Søyland, Martin & Høyland, Bjørn (2021). The Politics of Legislative Debates. In Bäck, Hanna; Debus, Marc & Fernandes, Jorge (Ed.), The politics of legislative debates. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780198849063. p. 633–650. doi: 10.1093/oso/9780198849063.003.0031. Show summary

  In this chapter, we describe the institutional setting of parliamentary debate in Stortinget and identify correlates of speech participation, drawing on a dataset of more than a quarter of a million speeches from 1998 to 2016. The key correlate of speech participation is committee membership in the committee responsible for preparing the report for the topic under discussion. However, that is not the whole story. Party elites speak more than backbenchers. As speaking time is allocated proportional to party size, MPs from the smaller parties speak more often than their counterparts in the larger parties. While we uncover a gender difference in the overall allocation of speeches, this is only present amongst parties on the right of the political spectrum. We do not find a similar difference in length of speech or allocation of speeches amongst members within the same committee. Hence, we ascribe the gender difference in speeches to gender differences in committee composition.

• Finseraas, Henning; Høyland, Bjørn & Søyland, Martin G. (2020). Climate politics in hard times: How local economic shocks influence MPs attention to climate change. European Journal of Political Research. ISSN 0304-4130. doi: 10.1111/1475-6765.12415. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Most countries struggle to implement CO2 reducing policies. Implementation is politically difficult since it typically forces politicians to trade‐off different concerns. The literature on how parties and members of parliament (MPs) handle these trade‐offs is sparse. We use structural topic models to study how MPs in an oil dependent environment responded to a shock in the oil price that created spatially concentrated costs of climate policies. We leverage the rapid oil price drop between parliamentary sessions and MPs’ constituency adherence in a difference‐in‐differences framework to identify if MPs respond differently to variation in the salience of trade‐offs. We find that MPs facing high political costs of climate policies tried to avoid environmental topics, while less affected MPs talked more about investments in green energy when the oil price declined. Our results suggest that the oil price bust created a ‘window of opportunity’ for advocates of the ‘ green shift’.

• Søyland, Martin G. & Høyland, Bjørn (2019). Electoral Reform and Parliamentary Debates. Legislative Studies Quarterly. ISSN 0362-9805. 44(4), p. 593–615. doi: 10.1111/lsq.12237. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The early twentieth century saw many democracies adopt proportional representative systems. The textbook explanation, pioneered by Rokkan, emphasize between-party electoral competition; the rise of the Socialist vote share made Bourgeois parties prefer PR systems to maximize their seat share. While appealing, this account is not entirely compelling. Consequently, scholars are investigating within-party explanations of support for such reforms. Particularly, Cox, Fiva, and Smith show how list PR enable party leaders to discipline members and build cohesive parties. Relying on roll-call votes across the Norwegian 1919 electoral reform from two-round single-member plurality to closed-list PR, they show that the internal party cohesion increased following the reform. We investigate how the Norwegian electoral reform changed the content of parliamentary speeches. Comparing speeches from MPs present both before and after the reform, we show how parties become more cohesive in parliamentary debates under list PR than they were under the single-member-district system

• Langsæther, Peter; Gjerløw, Haakon & Søyland, Martin G. (2019). Is all PR good PR? How the content of media exposure affects candidate popularity. Electoral Studies: an international journal on voting and electoral systems and strategy. ISSN 0261-3794. 57, p. 143–152. doi: 10.1016/j.electstud.2018.11.009. Full text in Research Archive
• Lapponi, Emanuele; Søyland, Martin G.; Velldal, Erik & Oepen, Stephan (2018). The Talk of Norway: A Richly Annotated Corpus of the Norwegian Parliament, 1998–2016. Language Resources and Evaluation. ISSN 1574-020X. 52(3), p. 873–893. doi: 10.1007/s10579-018-9411-5. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this work we present the Talk of Norway (ToN) data set, a collection of Norwegian Parliament speeches from 1998 to 2016. Every speech is richly annotated with metadata harvested from different sources, and augmented with language type, sentence, token, lemma, part-of-speech, and morphological feature annotations. We also present a pilot study on party classification in the Norwegian Parliament, carried out in the context of a cross-faculty collaboration involving researchers from both Political Science and Computer Science. Our initial experiments demonstrate how the linguistic and institutional annotations in ToN can be used to gather insights on how different aspects of the political process affect classification.

• Søyland, Martin G. (2017). Survival of the Ministers: On Ministerial Durability in Postwar Norway. Scandinavian Political Studies. ISSN 0080-6757. 40(2), p. 182–206. doi: 10.1111/1467-9477.12086. Full text in Research Archive
• Søyland, Martin G. (2015). Tilbakeholden og ekspansiv liberalisme: - Om utenrikspolitikk i State of the Union-taler. Internasjonal Politikk. ISSN 0020-577X. 73(1), p. 7–28. doi: 10.17585/ip.v73.241.

View all works in Cristin

• Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Dahlum, Sirianne; Allern, Elin Haugsgjerd; Hagfors, Sara Bjønness; Klausen, Jan Erling & Søyland, Martin [Show all 7 contributors for this article] (2023). Tilstandsanalyse av det norske demokratiet. Kommunal- og distriktsdepartementet.

View all works in Cristin