The drama is in the ink: Conflict in written parliamentary questions

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.