POLTE

POLTE studies political temporalities in the Finnish Parliament from 1976 until today, a period commonly viewed as a major transformation in culture, politics and society. We ask how politicians generate narrative trajectories of change and continuity to argue for political action. Conventional narratives of historical change have lost their explanatory power in the face of unexpected global phenomena and the fragmentation of political ideologies. Narrative as a sense-making operation helps us organize time with the sequential logic of stories. POLTE combines theoretical approaches from transdisciplinary narrative studies, political and conceptual history with computational modeling based on linguistic features. Two fully digitized datasets comprising Finnish parliamentary records of plenary sessions and the Library of Parliament oral history collection of veteran MPs' interviews are studied with explorative data mining, detailed textual analysis and contextual metadata evaluation.

2022

2026