Doublespeak? Sustainability in the Arctic—A Text Mining Analysis of Norwegian Parliamentary Speeches

Mikko Moilanen and Stein Østbye
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Mikko Moilanen: School of Business and Economics, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, 9037 Tromsø, Norway
Stein Østbye: School of Business and Economics, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, 9037 Tromsø, Norway

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 16, 1-15

Abstract: This paper contributes to the recent literature on sustainability in the Arctic as a political concept. Parliamentary proceedings have increasingly been recognized as an important source of information for eliciting political issues. In this paper, we use unsupervised text mining techniques to analyze parliamentary speeches for Norway from the period from 2009 to 2016 to answer whether political coalitions talk differently about sustainability in the Arctic depending on being in opposition or government. We find that the difference between being in government and opposition, controlling for political label (left-right), is far more important than the difference between left and right, controlling for role (opposition-government). The results suggest that in the trade-off between political preferences and election success, the balance is tilted in favour of the latter. Our interpretation is that opportunistic behavior seems to dominate partisan behavior in the politics related to sustainability in the Arctic.

Keywords: text mining: sustainability; arctic; partisan theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:16:p:9397-:d:619035

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