31/08/2026
🏛️ How does political decision-making actually work?
Parliamentary debates and voting records are more transparent than ever – yet we still know surprisingly little about why legislators vote the way they do.
In the new blog post, Hendrik Erz explores how combining voting data, parliamentary speeches, and modern text-analysis methods can reveal the social mechanisms behind political decision-making. The findings suggest that parties matter – but social mechanisms can sometimes be even stronger.
What does this mean for our understanding of polarization, coalitions, and democracy? And what new opportunities do large language models offer political sociology?
https://www.politik-wissenschaft.org/2026/08/31/a-political-sociology-of-parliamentary-politics/