Group Identities and Parliamentary Debates (2025)
with Jon Fiva and Henning Øien, Accepted, 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 (2025)
with Martin Søyland, Oxford Handbook of Norwegian Politics
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.
Chilling in the Shade: Climate change resilience and climate change beliefs (2025)
The female vote and PR adoption
with Mona Morgan-Collins
Did women play a role in the adoption of proportional representation system? In this paper, we explore how women’s suffrage at the turn of the 20th century shaped politicians’ propensity to vote for the adoption of proportional electoral system (PR) in Norway. Extant literature uncovers two broad explanations for adoption of PR. One emphasizes strategic/instrumental incentives of parties and employers (e.g. Leemann and Mares 2014; Cusack et al 2010; Boix 1999; Cox et al 2018). The other emphasizes normative-based demands from voters and politicians (Blais et al 2004; Bol et al 2015). However, neither account considers the role of women. Whilst most Western countries that adopted PR at the turn of the twentieth century did so before women gained equal voting rights, this was not always the case. A notable exception is Norway (see Skorge 2023, Teele 2023), where women’s suffrage (1909, 1915 election years) was adopted before the switch to PR at the national level (and partly also local level) (1921 election year). We fill this gap by studying the role of women in the adoption of PR in Norway. Utilizing sex-separated data on turnout and roll calls of legislative support for PR, we find that politicians were more likely to support PR adoption in districts where women’s turnout was high. By showing that men’s turnout is not correlated with politicians’ propensity to support PR, we cast doubts on the possibility that these results reflect men’s preference for PR or demands for greater democratization of a highly active electorate.
Is Anyone Watching? The Effect of Green Social Norms on Self-Conscious Emotions
with Vin Arceneaux and Can Zengin
Female legislators’ attentiveness to climate change in the UK Parliament
with Heloïse Clolery
The causal effect of trust in government on green policymaking
Minority Strategies and Political Representation
with Apurav Yash Bhatiya, Sahar Parsa, Debraj Ray and Sarah Schneider
“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)