Building and Testing a Comparative Interface on Northwest European Historical Parliamentary Debates : Relative Term Frequency Analysis of British Representative Democracy

Abstract

Tensions between the people and parliament over representation are a normal feature of representative democracies. In this paper, we demonstrate how digital humanities analysis tools help in answering questions about the timing of debates on popular representation, tensions over its realization, and representatives’ changing perceptions on their parliamentary role. Our long-term approach to the conceptual history of political representation is based on the analysis of digitized parliamentary debates as nexuses of multi-sited political discourse. We combine computer-assisted distant and context-sensitive close reading to consider diachronic trends and synchronic political struggles surrounding political representation. Collocation analyses and visualizations of relative term frequencies reveal long-term patterns and anomalies, lead to new research questions, and justify the selection of cases for qualitative analysis. Here we present the first steps in the construction of a comparative interface, People and Parliament, that will include debates from several Northwest European parliaments. The interface is built on I-Analyzer, a web-based text and data mining application developed by the Utrecht University Digital Humanities Lab. We illustrate its potential with an example from the British parliament since the 2000s to demonstrate how, under an unwritten constitution, various forms of participatory democracy ranging from e-democracy to referendums have gained ground against representative democracy. While the Brexit referendum first appeared as a response to calls for strengthening direct democracy, it revealed difficulties in reconciling representative and participatory democracy.