Group Identities and Parliamentary Debates (2025)
with Jon Fiva and Henning Øien, Forthcoming, Journal of Politics
Norwegian Parliamentary Debates Dataset 1945–2024
with Jon Fiva and Henning Øien, Nature Scientific Data (2025) [DATA]
Data set with all Norwegian Parliamentary speeches in the period 1945 – 2024. We also include speaker and speech meta data (e.g., committee membership, district, minister, elected, deputy…).
Legislative party groups and party cohesion (book chapter)
with Martin Søyland, Oxford Handbook of Norwegian Politics (2025)
How Does Party Discipline Affect Legislative Behavior? Evidence from Within-Term Variation in Lame-Duck Status
with Jon Fiva, Quarterly Journal of Political Science (2024)
Nedregård, O., & Abrahamsen, B. (2018). Frafall fra profesjonsutdanningene ved OsloMet. ISO 690
Staying in Line or Straying for Votes: Party Discipline and Dyadic Representation (2025)
How does strong party discipline shape legislators’ responsiveness to local concerns? In list-based proportional representation systems, parties’ control of ballot rankings creates strong incentives to align with party elites, which is postulated to distort the constituency-representative link. I develop a theory of cohesion under PR and test it in Norway – a uniquely beneficial setting to study party discipline. Leveraging seat security to capture within-party, within-district variations in incentives to align with districts, I show that legislators who are more dependent on local voters to secure reelection deviate more from the party line during local distress, compared to safe MPs. Deviations are rewarded by constituents but penalized by voters in other districts, demonstrating how deviations can benefit the legislator but be costly to the party. This refines our understanding of cohesion under PR by showing how electoral incentives shape legislative behavior not only across electoral systems but also within them.
The effect of legislative misalignment on the representation of constituency interests (2025) with Vardges Levonyan
How do elected representatives respond when they learn that they are misaligned with their constituencies? While existing research has documented various mechanisms promoting alignment between public opinion and legislative behavior, including electoral turnover, candidate self-selection, and elite influence on public opinion, less is known about how politicians handle misalignment. Previous studies suggest two primary responses: updating positions to match constituent preferences or discounting opposing views. We propose and investigate a third response: strategic issue avoidance. Using the 2016 Brexit referendum as an information treatment that creates within-issue, within-election period, within-MP variation in alignment, we study how MPs responded to sudden, measurable incongruence with their constituencies. We find that MPs who learn that they are misaligned with their districts avoid issues on which they are misaligned, relative to their aligned counterparts. When speaking about the misaligned issue, they avoid stance-taking on the issue. They also avoid mentioning their constituency. Our results show how misaligned MPs abstain from controversial issues to avoid drawing attention to topics where there is a mismatch between the legislature and the constituency.
The female vote and PR adoption (2025)
with Mona Morgan-Collins
Did women’s suffrage play any role in the adoption of proportional systems (PR)? Extant literature uncovers three broad explanations for the spread of PR across Western Europe at the turn of the 20th century. These explanations emphasize the rise of electoral, economic and party threats generated by the expansion of men’s suffrage. Interestingly, neither account considers the role of women’s suffrage. This ‘analytical’ invisibility of women’s suffrage is striking, especially given that countries that adopted both PR and women’s suffrage at the turn of the 20th century almost invariably adopted PR at the same time or shortly after women’s suffrage. In this paper, we suggest that this sequencing of electoral reforms was not coincidental and develop a novel explanation of PR adoption that highlights an electoral threat posed by women’s suffrage. Women’s votes were both distinct as well as more volatile than men’s. This required that politicians adapted their campaign appeals and built solid support base among women. We argue that support of PR was a direct response to the influx of new voters. Framing PR as a group-based appeal to women, politicians could both better capture and stabilize women’s votes, mitigating the threats posed by women’s suffrage. Using the case of Norway, we conduct extensive archival work to demonstrate that politicians frequently justified PR reform with references to women’s representation and that women’s groups invariably lobbied for the reform. Using district-level electoral and roll-call data, we then show that politicians were more likely to vote for PR in districts when women constituted larger share of voters. Including a large battery of controls, we account for all existing explanation and show that the weight of women’s votes is the strongest predictor of PR than any other extant explanations. Beyond uncovering a novel explanation of PR adoption at the turn of the 20th century, this paper has profound implications for the role of women’s suffrage on women’s representation. Our results suggest that women’s suffrage alone may not improve women’s descriptive and substantive representation if it is not accompanied with an otherwise inclusive electoral institution.
Gendered Voices in Climate Politics: Evidence from the UK Parliament
with Heloïse Clolery
Are female legislators more attentive to climate change issues than men? Despite evidence that female voters express greater concern for climate change and more frequently engage in pro-environmental behavior, it remains unclear whether these gender differences are mirrored in legislatures. Adopting a regression discontinuity design to study UK parliamentary speeches and voting records, we examine whether female legislators are more attentive to climate change and adopt more progressive climate positions than their male counterparts. We find no significant gender differences in attention to or positioning on climate issues, suggesting that, at least in the context of climate change topics, descriptive representation does not automatically translate into substantive representation. Supplementary analyses indicate that these null results are driven by party control and centralized agenda-setting on climate topics, which constrain individual MPs’ ability to express independent views. Our findings suggest that, rather than focusing on increasing women’s electability, greater attention should be given to encouraging parties to adopt more environmentally ambitious platforms.
More Catholic than the Pope? Ethnic Identity and Political Ideology
with Apurav Yash Bhatiya, Sahar Parsa, Debraj Ray and Sarah Schneider
The causal effect of trust in government on green policymaking
Chilling in the Shade: Climate change resilience and climate change beliefs
Is Anyone Watching? The Effect of Green Social Norms on Self-Conscious Emotions
with Vin Arceneaux and Can Zengin
Moral Values, Folklore, and Gender-Based Violence
with Sevinç Bermek, Konstantinos Matakos, Asli Unan
All You Need is Love? Romantic Ideals and Gendered Violence
with Sevinç Bermek, Konstantinos Matakos, Asli Unan
“Støres regjering er balansert på kjønn. Men hvor er distriktene og arbeiderklassen?”, Dagens Næringsliv (2025)
“Unge forskere”, Khrono (2025)
“Snakker mer om næringer de eier aksjer i”, Dagens Næringsliv (2023)
“Hyttepåske for hvem?”, NRK (2021)
“Må det en krise til før politikerne våkner?”, Aftenposten (2020)
“Amerikanske tilstander”, Dagsavisen (2019)
“Faglig interesserte studenter fullfører oftere utdanningen”, forskning.no (2018)