Presenting Parliament: Parliamentarians' visions of the communication and role of parliament within the mediated democracies of Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands, 1844-1995

ended

The concept of a ‘personalization of politics’ suggests that media attention has increasingly focussed on personalities such as ministers at the cost of institutions, yet paradoxically parliaments have maintained media visibility. While researchers have studied the relation between media and executive leaders or political parties, there is little scholarship on how parliaments as collectives have communicated to the public. However, democracy fails if citizens cannot see the functioning of their representative body, so parliaments have sought to show their work publicly. This project investigates how they tried to do so, and will thereby demonstrate the important role that parliaments played in the ‘mediatization of politics’. Specifically, it investigates: (1) which arguments parliamentarians voiced against parliament’s use of new means of communication; (2) how and why parliamentarians wanted to use new media to communicate parliament to the public; and (3) how parliamentarians envisioned the role of parliament within a (mass) mediated democracy. The method is a longitudinal and comparative analysis of parliamentary debates on parliament’s engagements with new media – the mass press, radio, television and internet – in Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands between 1844 and 1995. Debates are found with OCR in the hitherto undigitized parliamentary proceedings of these countries, and are analyzed using the novel topic modelling method. Relevant topics are then selected for qualitative analysis. Dissemination occurs through three articles on the sub questions submitted to journals, seminar and conference presentations, and teaching. The host institution provides international expertise and resources on the history of media-political systems, and the secondments offer additional perspectives, archives, and research networks related to parliamentary history. Overall, the project management experience and teacher certification enable me to become an autonomous academic.