Martin G. Søyland

• Nedregård, Oda & Søyland, Martin (2025). Legislative Party Groups in the Storting : Cohesion and discipline. I Kolltveit, Kristoffer; Allern, Elin Haugsgjerd; Braut-Hegghammer, Målfrid & Rasch, Bjørn Erik (Red.), Oxford Handbook of Norwegian Politics. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780198888581. s. 356–374. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198888581.013.0019. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This chapter provides an overview of legislative party groups in the Norwegian parliament and the issue of to what extent parties are characterized by cohesion. By defining cohesion as observable unity of party groups, the chapter starts by discussing which incentives members of parliament (MPs) have to dissent from the party line and when party leaders can be expected to allow such dissent. Further, the chapter outlines the anatomy of parliamentary party groups in the context of the Norwegian electoral system, the formal rules guiding parties in parliament, intra-party rules and structure, and the important role committees play in the Storting (parliament). Then, the chapter reviews, corroborates, and extends the findings of previous research in the Norwegian parliament by analysing cohesion in voting and parliamentary debates. The main conclusion is that party cohesion is high, but also that MP discretion is contingent on the arena in which the MP participates.

• Bjørkholt, Solveig & Søyland, Martin (2024). The drama is in the ink: Conflict in written parliamentary questions. Legislative Studies Quarterly. ISSN 0362-9805. doi: 10.1111/lsq.12474. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Opposition is a core component of any democracy, yet it is scarcely studied. Leaning on research prescribing blurred lines between government and opposition in parliamentary democracies, we use word embeddings in tandem with sentiment analysis on written parliamentary questions in the Norwegian parliament to study conflict patterns between the government and opposition. Our findings consistently show that MPs of governing parties are more negative than MPs of the opposition. However, the effect is reduced considerably when the topical content of the question is included in the analysis. We attribute our finding to the existence of a participation threshold in parliamentary questions; MPs of governing parties will only ask questions whenever a given issue is sufficiently contentious.

• Søyland, Martin (2022). Party Control and Responsiveness: How MPs Use Variation in Lower-Level Institutional Design as an Electoral Responsiveness Mechanism. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. 3133. doi: 10.5617/dhnbpub.11263. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Different parliamentary activities allow Members of Parliament (MPs) varying amounts of autonomy. Previous studies have shown that, in parliamentary systems with strong parties and party-centered electoral rules, MPs have limited room for crossing the party line in the legislature both in voting and speech. Further, party-centered systems limit MP’s ability to address electoral concerns of their constituency; they are less responsive. In this paper, I combine these findings by showing that even within system variation in party control over institutions affects the levels of responsiveness in parliamentary questions. By linking MP’s constituency mentions with different types of questions, my results show that the institutional design in the Norwegian Storting affects the level of MP constituency signaling. Specifically, I show that questions with low levels of party control and public attention (written questions and question time) give MPs far more opportunity to raise constituency specific issues than the more party controlled activities (interpellations and question hours). Consequently, I argue that responsiveness does not disappear in party-centered systems; it is located at lower-level institutions. Particularly, some types of questions, where shirking from the party line is less consequential and the party organizations have less control over its members, allow for constituency signaling.

• Søyland, Martin & Høyland, Bjørn (2021). Norway: Committee-Membership Matters, Party Loyalty Decides. I Bäck, Hanna; Debus, Marc & Fernandes, Jorge (Red.), The politics of legislative debates. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780198849063. s. 633–650. doi: 10.1093/oso/9780198849063.003.0031. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  In this chapter, we describe the institutional setting of parliamentary debate in Stortinget and identify correlates of speech participation, drawing on a dataset of more than a quarter of a million speeches from 1998 to 2016. The key correlate of speech participation is committee membership in the committee responsible for preparing the report for the topic under discussion. However, that is not the whole story. Party elites speak more than backbenchers. As speaking time is allocated proportional to party size, MPs from the smaller parties speak more often than their counterparts in the larger parties. While we uncover a gender difference in the overall allocation of speeches, this is only present amongst parties on the right of the political spectrum. We do not find a similar difference in length of speech or allocation of speeches amongst members within the same committee. Hence, we ascribe the gender difference in speeches to gender differences in committee composition.

• Finseraas, Henning; Høyland, Bjørn & Søyland, Martin G. (2020). Climate politics in hard times: How local economic shocks influence MPs attention to climate change. European Journal of Political Research. ISSN 0304-4130. doi: 10.1111/1475-6765.12415. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Most countries struggle to implement CO2 reducing policies. Implementation is politically difficult since it typically forces politicians to trade‐off different concerns. The literature on how parties and members of parliament (MPs) handle these trade‐offs is sparse. We use structural topic models to study how MPs in an oil dependent environment responded to a shock in the oil price that created spatially concentrated costs of climate policies. We leverage the rapid oil price drop between parliamentary sessions and MPs’ constituency adherence in a difference‐in‐differences framework to identify if MPs respond differently to variation in the salience of trade‐offs. We find that MPs facing high political costs of climate policies tried to avoid environmental topics, while less affected MPs talked more about investments in green energy when the oil price declined. Our results suggest that the oil price bust created a ‘window of opportunity’ for advocates of the ‘ green shift’.

• Langsæther, Peter; Gjerløw, Haakon & Søyland, Martin G. (2019). Is all PR good PR? How the content of media exposure affects candidate popularity. Electoral Studies: an international journal on voting and electoral systems and strategy. ISSN 0261-3794. 57, s. 143–152. doi: 10.1016/j.electstud.2018.11.009. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Existing evidence shows that media exposure is associated with increased political popularity, but we know less about how the electoral effects of media coverage may vary with the content of the coverage. By collecting hundreds of thousands of media articles, which we then sort by content using automatic topic modelling, we build a unique dataset of political candidates, their popularity, and the quantity and type of media exposure that candidates receive. Analysing this dataset, we find that media attention is, indeed, an electoral asset. Further, and crucially, we find that voters reward politicians for politically relevant exposure, while non-political exposure is ignored, or even penalised. Consequently, this is good news for how democracies work; voters hold politicians accountable based on relevant information. The findings are of relevance to students of media, political behaviour, parties and political competition, as well as normative democratic theory.

• Søyland, Martin G. & Høyland, Bjørn (2019). Electoral Reform and Parliamentary Debates. Legislative Studies Quarterly. ISSN 0362-9805. 44(4), s. 593–615. doi: 10.1111/lsq.12237. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  The early twentieth century saw many democracies adopt proportional representative systems. The textbook explanation, pioneered by Rokkan, emphasize between-party electoral competition; the rise of the Socialist vote share made Bourgeois parties prefer PR systems to maximize their seat share. While appealing, this account is not entirely compelling. Consequently, scholars are investigating within-party explanations of support for such reforms. Particularly, Cox, Fiva, and Smith show how list PR enable party leaders to discipline members and build cohesive parties. Relying on roll-call votes across the Norwegian 1919 electoral reform from two-round single-member plurality to closed-list PR, they show that the internal party cohesion increased following the reform. We investigate how the Norwegian electoral reform changed the content of parliamentary speeches. Comparing speeches from MPs present both before and after the reform, we show how parties become more cohesive in parliamentary debates under list PR than they were under the single-member-district system

• Lapponi, Emanuele; Søyland, Martin G.; Velldal, Erik & Oepen, Stephan (2018). The Talk of Norway: A Richly Annotated Corpus of the Norwegian Parliament, 1998–2016. Language Resources and Evaluation. ISSN 1574-020X. 52(3), s. 873–893. doi: 10.1007/s10579-018-9411-5. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  In this work we present the Talk of Norway (ToN) data set, a collection of Norwegian Parliament speeches from 1998 to 2016. Every speech is richly annotated with metadata harvested from different sources, and augmented with language type, sentence, token, lemma, part-of-speech, and morphological feature annotations. We also present a pilot study on party classification in the Norwegian Parliament, carried out in the context of a cross-faculty collaboration involving researchers from both Political Science and Computer Science. Our initial experiments demonstrate how the linguistic and institutional annotations in ToN can be used to gather insights on how different aspects of the political process affect classification.

• Søyland, Martin G. (2017). Survival of the Ministers: On Ministerial Durability in Postwar Norway. Scandinavian Political Studies. ISSN 0080-6757. 40(2), s. 182–206. doi: 10.1111/1467-9477.12086. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  The field of ministerial durability, showing why some ministers are dismissed and others not, has increased in size over the last decade. Specifically, linking ministerial performance through resignation calls with durability has been applied to both majoritarian and semi-presidential systems, whereas this link is less explored in consensual electoral systems. Thus, this study explores the relationship between ministerial performance and durability in postwar Norway, drawing on the principal-agent theory for parliamentary democracies and the accountability link between party leaders and ministers. The main finding is that there are many similarities to other studies’ ministerial durability and performance. By measuring performance in resignation calls coming through the media, it is found that ministerial durability is decreased when performance is low: the more resignation calls a minister gets, the more likely the minister is to be removed by the party leader. Consequently, it is argued that ministers generally are held accountable by their party leaders whenever they are perceived to perform badly. Even though it is argued in the article that studies on ministerial durability and performance would benefit from alternative performance measures, the analysis shows that resignation calls give a good indication of how party leaders hold ministers accountable. This is the peer reviewed version of the following article which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9477.12086. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.

• Søyland, Martin G. (2015). Tilbakeholden og ekspansiv liberalisme: - Om utenrikspolitikk i State of the Union-taler. Internasjonal Politikk. ISSN 0020-577X. 73(1), s. 7–28. doi: 10.17585/ip.v73.241. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

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• Thorsen, Dag Einar; Jøsok, Evy & Søyland, Martin (2026). Fokus - Politikk og menneskerettigheter. Aschehoug & Co. ISBN 9788203414732. 398 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thorsen, Dag Einar; Jøsok, Evy & Søyland, Martin (2026). FOKUS Politikk og menneskerettigheter. Aschehoug & Co. ISBN 9788203414732. 201 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

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• Søyland, Martin & Knutsen, Carl Henrik (2026). Eliteprivilegier og ansvarsflukt. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Røed, Maiken & Søyland, Martin (2026). Det gjenstår å se om et lobbyregister faktisk kommer på plass - Altinget. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  En utredning av behovet for et lobbyregister er et skritt i riktig retning mot økt åpenhet om påvirkningsarbeid i norsk politikk. Men demokratisk valgte politikere har ikke gjort seg kjent for å innføre strengere regulering av seg selv, skriver Maiken Røed og Martin Søyland.

• Søyland, Martin (2026). Demokratitilstanden i Norge - er det grunn til bekymring? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Søyland, Martin (2025). Bistanden kan stoppe opp: Regjeringens budsjett uten flertall kan gi risiko for frys. [Journal]. Internett. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Regjeringen står uten flertall for budsjettet etter brudd med SV og MDG. Hvis det ikke blir enighet før nyttår, må staten styre etter fjorårets rammer – noe som særlig kan ramme bistand og klima, som krever årlige vedtak og fleksible bevilgninger. Konflikten kan dermed sette store internasjonale prosjekter på vent.

• Søyland, Martin & Høyland, Bjørn (2025). KI og valg. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Valgdagen er over – men spørsmålene om KIs påvirkning lever videre. Dagen etter stortingsvalget inviterer vi til fersk kaffe og debrief: Hvilken rolle spilte kunstig intelligens – hvis noen?

• Søyland, Martin (2025). Demokrati under press. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Statsvitar Martin Søyland og stortingsrepresentant Ingrid Fiskaa diskuterar demokrati.

• Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Dahlum, Sirianne; Allern, Elin Haugsgjerd; Hagfors, Sara Bjønness; Klausen, Jan Erling & Søyland, Martin [Vis alle 7 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2023). Tilstandsanalyse av det norske demokratiet. Kommunal- og distriktsdepartementet. doi: https:/www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/b242728c615c40f3a720a56acd56971a/tinde_2023_rapport_endelig_versjon.pdf. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Søyland, Martin (2020). Parliamentary Debates in Norway: A Computational Social Science Approach. Universitetet i Oslo. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Legislative debates are understudied in political science. Modern tools for analyzing speech content has, fortunately, given us an opportunity to make inferences based on an ever increasing accessibility of vast corpora of texts that has only been analyzed in parts before. This thesis covers Norwegian parliamentary debates with the overarching theme of using speech to assess the effects of institutional and external shocks on MP behavior. The thesis has three main contributions. First, it provides a large corpus of automatically annotated Norwegian parliamentary debates – both the first openly accessible structured data on parliamentary debates in Norway and the first open access linguistically annotated parliamentary speech data in the world. Second, the thesis shows how contextual knowledge and data pre-processing is invaluable for subsequent analyses. Finally, the thesis gives two examples of inferential analyses on MP behavior based on parliamentary debates: these analyses show that changing electoral systems alters the vote-seeking incentives of MPs and that disproportional external shocks alter the behavior of MPs based on their constituency, rather than party affiliation.

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