Norwegian Parliamentary Debates Dataset 1945–2024
with Jon Fiva and Henning Øien, Conditionally accepted, Nature Scientific 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 (2024)
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
Group Identities and Parliamentary Debates (2024)
with Jon Fiva and Henning Øien, 3rd round RR, Journal of Politics
Staying in Line or Straying for Votes: Party Discipline and Dyadic Representation (2024)
How does strong party discipline affect legislators’ responsiveness to local concerns? In list-based proportional representation systems, the election of candidates depends largely on their position on the ballot. This gives parties strong tools to discipline their elected officials, which can distort the link between the constituency and the representative. I test this hypothesis by studying speech allocation between legislators with heterogeneous incentives to deviate from the party line during local economic downturns in the party-centered environment of Norway. I find that only representatives with comparatively strong incentives to align with party elites at the expense of local voters speak more about unemployment when their ditricts are experiencing during local economic downturns. Deviations from the party line are rewarded by local voters but penalized by the party, which tightens floor access for deviating MPs. This demonstrates how strong parties in PR can obstruct the constituency-representative link in the pursuit of maintaining a coherent party brand.
Chilling in the Shade: Climate change resilience and climate change beliefs (2024)
A large literature shows that risk perceptions are important to understand individuals’ attitude formation. How does resilience to climate change affect citizens’ climate attitudes? I show that the ability to address the negative consequences of climate change, and not vulnerability to climate change, is important to understand climate change perceptions. Citizens in developed Western economies with a high degree of climate change resilience are less likely to see humans as the main driver of climate change and are less likely to call for strengthened public and private action to mitigate emissions. These findings are important to understand the lack of climate ambition by shedding light on how strengthened resilience can compensate for vulnerability but at the risk of compromising future support for green policymaking.
The effect of legislative misalignment on representation of constituency interests
with Vardges Levonyan
We study how the correction of imperfect information in the legislature affects the representation of constituency interests. While belief updating ideally is expected to result in re-optimization by market actors, the effect on elite behaviour is less clear. This is because MPs pay a reputation cost when altering their policy stands, which could result in them abstaining from re-aligning with their districts when they receive new information about their constituencies’ preferences. Using a difference-in-differences setup and the Brexit referendum as a natural experiment that educates MPs about their constituencies’ leaning, we find that MPs who unexpectedly learn that they are misaligned with their districts (receive a negative information shock) avoid issues on which they are misaligned, relative to aligned MPs. Instead, they use more populist rhetoric, and push party ideology to obtain re-alignment. Our results show how legislators use populism and polarization as tools to avoid drawing attention to issues where there is a mismatch between voters and the legislature.
Fueling politics: Political ideology, election dynamics, and oil search licenses
According to classical political science, legislators can improve their re-election chances using economic mechanisms. So called economic voting – that voters reward and punish incumbents based on the performance of the economy – has received considerable empirical support. However, with a heterogenous voter base, certain policies run the risk of alienating voters when voters care about the costs of policies across multiple dimensions and not only the net economic effect. Studying policies with high economic gains, but high environmental costs, I find that coalitions with a more heterogenous voter base are less inclined to use such policies to mobilize voters in election years. The incumbent is more likely to prioritize economic value over environmental concerns when struggling on the polls, but the effect is stronger for coalitions with a strong ‘pro-economy’ voter base. In contrast, coalition with heterogenous supporters tend to push environmentally compromising policies early in the election term. These results are important to understand how electoral accountability shapes trade-offs between green policymaking and economic gain.
The causal effect of trust in government on green policymaking
The female vote and PR adoption
with Mona Morgan-Collins
Minority Strategies and Political Selection
with Apurav Yash Bhatiya and Sarah Schneider
“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)