Pasi Ihalainen, Professor of Comparative European History at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), will discuss merging conceptual and digital history to study the transnational evolution of parliamentary democracy.

Practical information

This lecture will take place on Friday, 7 February 2025, from 13.30 to 14.30 hours in room 0.21 of the Utrecht University Library, City Centre (Drift 27, Utrecht). You can also join this lecture online, in which case you will receive a Teams link before the lecture. Participation is free, both in-person and online.

Abstract

Building on our previous research on the history of democracy and parliamentarism by conventional methods, this paper suggests ways to merge conceptual and digital history to study the transnational evolution of parliamentary democracy. Conceptual history leads us to analyse ‘democracy’ as a contested and historically changing concept, focusing on multi-layered meanings attached to ‘representative democracy’ and considering different challenges to democracy in different eras and countries. Digital history supports a systematic, data-driven analysis of competing redefinitions of democracy with help from an exceptionally large comparative database (People & Parliament, the Dutch corpus of which is open at UU I-Analyzer) that provides parallel text mining tools for national datasets from ten countries since the nineteenth century as well as the European Parliament since 1999. We thus combine the quantitative text-mining of big data to discover patterns of diachronic change in discourses with qualitative, contextualizing analysis of selected speech acts.

We see debates in national and transnational assemblies as meeting places and analytical nexuses for discourses on democracy moving in societies, contributed to by the claimed representatives of the people. Parliamentary debates provide sources on ongoing transnational discussions on making democracy work, democracy being constantly redefined by MPs in interaction with transnational, public and academic debates.

The paper introduces several case studies demonstrating the potential of our approach. Time allowing, we will also reflect on methodological prospects for future research supported by AI and LLMs.

About

Pasi Ihalainen is Professor of Comparative European History at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, concentrating on the history of political discourse in the long term and from comparative and transnational perspectives. Currently, as an Academy of Finland Professor at the Department of History and Ethnology, he studies the history of representative democracy and especially tensions between parliament and the people between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, combining quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse digitised parliamentary debates from nine Northwest European countries. His previous research topics include political pluralism, parliamentarism, nationalism and internationalism. Professor Ihalainen is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.

Workshop

You are also very welcome to register for the CDH workshop on exploring parliamentary data in I-Analyzer. This workshop will take place in-person (in the same location as this lecture) as well as online, shortly after this lecture between 15.00 and 17.00 hours.

In this workshop, you will learn how to explore the corpus ‘People & Parliament‘ in the open-source, online tool I-Analyzer. The workshop is taught by the scientific developers from the CDH Research Software Lab who are continuously developing this tool.

Level

No prior knowledge of or experience with digital humanities will be required. The lecture will be in English.

For whom?

This lecture is open to all who are interested in joining either in person or online.

Registration

Please complete the registration form below if you wish to sign up for this lecture. Register early to secure your place, as spots are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

If you find yourself unable to attend after completing registration, we kindly request that you cancel your registration by sending an email to cdh@uu.nl, allowing us to offer the spot to another participant. Thank you for your cooperation.