Mapping Presence and Absence in Parliamentary Speech Using Automated Text-Analysis Methods

Political representation is about presence and absence. We know quite a bit about who makes whom present in what ways in the political process. There is, however, a glaring lack of research into understanding the politics of absence – who is made absent by whom, how, when, and why in the process of political representation? This paper employs automated text analysis methods to capture groups which are present and absent in national legislators’ parliamentary speech in Austria, Germany, and Spain as well as Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) across policy areas and over time (2009-2024). Since these tools can only measure who is present, established theories on long-term lines of conflict in Western European societies, known as cleavages, along with assessments of issue salience and affectedness will be employed as benchmarks to approximate who is absent by identifying those that we would expect to be present. These methods enable large-scale and longitudinal comparisons, uncovering new dimensions of representational dynamics across time and contexts. The panel further situates these findings within broader theoretical debates on the transformations of representative democracy, addressing key questions about inclusion and exclusion, and shedding light on how these processes influence the legitimacy and responsiveness of representative institutions in contemporary democracies.