Bjørn Høyland

Bjørn Høyland

Professor of Political Science

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Pages

Posts

Blog Post number 4

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Blog Post number 2

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Blog Post number 1

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portfolio

publications

Allocation of Codecision Reports in the Fifth European Parliament

Published in European Union Politics, 2006

This article argues that MEPs from national parties represented in the Council of Ministers are more active as rapporteurs on Codecision legislation than MEPs from national parties not represented in the Council.

Recommended citation: Bjørn Høyland (2006)."Allocation of Codecision Reports in the Fifth European Parliament."European Union Politics 7 (1) 30 - 50. https://doi.org/10.1177/1465116506060911

The EU Annual Budgetary Procedure: The Existing Rules and Proposed Reforms of the Convention and Intergovernmental Conference 2002–04

Published in Journal of Common Market Studies, 2007

This article analyses the proposed reform of the annual budgetary procedure of the European Union (EU) during the 2002–04 Convention and Intergovernmental Conference (IGC).

Recommended citation: Giacomo Benedetto and Bjørn Høyland (2007)."The EU Annual Budgetary Procedure: The Existing Rules and Proposed Reforms of the Convention and Intergovernmental Conference 2002–04."Journal of Common Market Studies 45 (3) 565 - 587. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5965.2007.00727.x

Parties in the Council?

Published in Journal of European Public Policy, 2008

We investigate to what extent formal position-taking in the Council of the European Union can be explained by the ideological party affiliation of the governing parties.

Recommended citation: Sara Hagemann and Bjørn Høyland (2008)."Parties in the Council?."Journal of European Public Policy 15 (8) 1205 - 1221. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501760802407714

An automated database of the european parliament

Published in European Union Politics, 2009

We present an automatically updatable database of background information about Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from 1979 until the present.

Recommended citation: Bjørn Høyland, Indraneel Sircar and Simon Hix (2010)."An automated database of the european parliament."European Union Politics 10 (1) 143 - 152. https://doi.org/10.1177/1465116508099764

Legislative Involvement in Parliamentary Systems: Opportunities, Conflict, and Institutional Constraints

Published in American Political Science Review, 2009

In this article, we investigate legislative involvement in the transposition of 724 directives in 15 member states from 1978 to 2004.

Recommended citation: Fabio Franchino and Bjørn Høyland (2010)."Legislative Involvement in Parliamentary Systems: Opportunities, Conflict, and Institutional Constraints."American Political Science Review 103 (4) 607 - 621. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055409990177

Get the Party Started: Development of Political Party Legislative Dynamics in the Irish Free State Seanad (1922—36)

Published in Party Politics, 2010

We compile and analyse a unique dataset of all roll-call votes for all the sessions of the Irish Free State Seanad

Recommended citation: Indraneel Sircar and Bjørn Høyland (2010)."Get the Party Started: Development of Political Party Legislative Dynamics in the Irish Free State Seanad (1922—36)."Party Politics 19 (1) 89 - 110. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068809341056

From doves to hawks: A spatial analysis of voting in the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England

Published in European Journal of Political Research, 2010

This article examines the making of monetary policy in the United Kingdom by analysing voting behaviour in the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee.

Recommended citation: Simon Hix, Bjørn Høyland, and Nick Vivyan (2010)."From doves to hawks: A spatial analysis of voting in the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England." European Journal of Political Research 49 (6) 731 - 758. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2010.01916.x

Simplifying the parallelization of scientific codes by a function-centric approach in Python

Published in Computational Science & Discovery, 2010

The purpose of this paper is to show how existing scientific software can be parallelized using a separate thin layer of Python code where all parallelization-specific tasks are implemented.

Recommended citation: Jon K. Nilsen, Xiang Cai, Bjørn Høyland, and Hans Petter Langtangen (2010)."Simplifying the parallelization of scientific codes by a function-centric approach in Python."Computational Science & Discovery 3 (1) 1 - 25. https://doi.org/10.1088/1749-4699/3/1/015003

Selection and Sanctioning in European Parliamentary Elections

Published in British Journal of Political Science, 2011

This article draws on a unique dataset on the political experience of party representatives in eighty-five national elections to the European Parliament to evaluate the extent to which voters prefer candidates with more political experience.

Recommended citation: Sara B. Hobolt and Bjørn Høyland (2011)."Selection and Sanctioning in European Parliamentary Elections." British Journal of Political Science 41 (3) 477 - 498. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123411000081

Legislative Voting in the Canadian Parliament

Published in Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2011

We analyze legislative voting in the 35th (1994–1997), 38th (2004–2005), and 39th (2006–2008) Canadian Parliaments.

Recommended citation: Jean-François Godbout and Bjørn Høyland (2011)."Legislative Voting in the Canadian Parliament." Canadian Journal of Political Science 44 (2) 367 - 388. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423911000175

Coalition voting and minority governments in Canada

Published in Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 2011

Inter-party voting coalitions in three minority cabinets were analysed: the 38th (2004–05), 39th (2006–08) and 40th (2008–11) Federal Canadian Parliaments. The analysis demonstrates that voting coalitions also form along a second dimension in the Canadian Parliament, mainly on issues related to federalism and the province of Quebec.

Recommended citation: Jean-François Godbout and Bjørn Høyland (2011)."Coalition voting and minority governments in Canada." Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 49 (4) 457 - 485. https://doi.org/10.1080/14662043.2011.615168

The tyranny of international index rankings

Published in Journal of Development Economics, 2012

We re-estimate commonly used index rankings in international development with a method that captures this uncertainty, it becomes clear that ranking every adjacent country is a rather courageous activity.

Recommended citation: Bjørn Høyland, Karl Moene and Fredrik Wilumsen (2012)."Tyranny of international index rankings." Journal of Development Economics 97 (1) 1 - 14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2011.01.007

Peace on quicksand? Challenging the conventional wisdom about economic growth and post-conflict risks

Published in Journal of Peace Research, 2012

We replicate Collier, Hoeffler & Söderbom using data from the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Database instead of the Correlates of War database, finding substantive differences.

Recommended citation: Marianne Dahl and Bjørn Høyland (2012)."Peace on quicksand? Challenging the conventional wisdom about economic growth and post-conflict risks." Journal of Peace Research 49 (3) 423 - 429. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343312436767

Predicting party affiliations from european parliament debates

Published in Proceedings of the acl 2014 workshop on language technologies and computational social science, 2014

This paper documents an ongoing effort to assess whether party group affiliation of participants in European Parliament debates can be automatically predicted on the basis of the content of their speeches, using a support vector machine multi-class model.

Recommended citation: Bjørn Høyland, Jean-François Godbout, Emanuele Lapponi, and Erik Velldal (2014)."Predicting party affiliations from european parliament debates."Proceedings of the acl 2014 workshop on language technologies and computational social science. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199653010.013.0021

Unity in Diversity? The Development of Political Parties in the Parliament of Canada, 1867 - 2011

Published in British Journal of Political Science, 2017

This paper explains the development of legislative party voting unity in the Parliament of Canada.

Recommended citation: Jean-François Godbout and Bjørn Høyland (2017)."Unity in Diversity? The Development of Political Parties in the Parliament of Canada, 1867–2011." British Journal of Political Science 47 (3) 545 - 569. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123415000368

Electoral Reform and Parliamentary Debates

Published in Legislative Studies Quarterly, 2019

We show how speeches turn from candidate-centric to party ideological contestation as a consequence of electoral reform.

Recommended citation: Bjørn Høyland and Martin G. Søyland (2019)."Electoral Reform and Parliamentary Debates." Legislative Studies Quarterly 44 (4) 593 - 615. https://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12237

Career ambitions and legislative participation: the moderating effect of electoral institutions

Published in British Journal of Political Science, 2019

This article argues that the design of the electoral institutions influences how politicians respond to career incentives.

Recommended citation: Bjørn Høyland, Sara B. Hobolt & Simon Hix (2019)."Career Ambitions and Legislative Participation: The Moderating Effect of Electoral Institutions ."British Journal of Political Science. 49 (2) 491 - 512. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123416000697

Delegation of committee reports in the European Parliament

Published in European Union Politics, 2020

Based on existing informational models, we argue that a more loyal committee member, everything else being equal, is more likely to be appointed as a rapporteur and that more expertise, holding preference divergence constant, has a non-monotonic effect because of informational credibility.

Recommended citation: Fang-Yi Chiou, Silje Synnøve Lyder Hermansen and Bjørn Høyland(2020)."Delegation of committee reports in the European Parliament." European Union Politics 21 (2) 233 - 254. https://doi.org/10.1177/1465116519894059

Climate Politics in Hard Times: How Local Economic Shocks Influence MPs Attention to Climate Change

Published in European Journal of Political Research, 2020

We find that MPs facing high political costs of climate policies tried to avoid environmental topics, while less affected MPs talked more about investments in Green energy when the oil price declined.

Recommended citation: Henning Finseraas, Bjørn Høyland and Martin G. Søyland (forthcoming)." Climate Politics in Hard Times: How Local Economic Shocks Influence MPs Attention to Climate Change " European Journal of Political Research .

teaching

STV4025 - Quantitative political science

Graduate course, University of Oslo, Department of Political Science, 2013

This is a course in quantitative political science. The aim is to provide a rigorous foundation for students interested in applying quantitative methods in their own research. The rst part of the course provides a thorough treatment of generalized linear models. We will cover both standard models and their hierarchical extentions. The main text for this part is Long, S. J. (1997). Regression Models for Categorical and Limited Dependent Variables. SAGE, London. The second section of the course covers event-history models. Here, the main text will be Box-Ste ensmeier, J. M. and Jones, B. S. (2004). Event History Modeling: A Guide to Social Scientists. Cambridge University Press. We will use R, a free statistical programming language. It is available at www.r-project.org. Here, you will also nd a lot of useful information about R. I also recommend you to use Rstudio, www.rstudio.org for running R on your computer. I use LATEX to typeset my papers and presentations. It works great in combination with R and Rstudio. If you are serious about learning R, study Matlo , N. (2011). The Art of R Programming: A Tour of Statistical Design. No Starch Press: San Fransisco. An introduction to LATEX can be found here: http://ctan.uib.no/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf. The course aims to teach students how to do reproducable research. In order to integrate LATEX and R, we will use knitr, http://yihui.name/knitr/. Each week will have two lectures and one computer class. One lecture will be devoted to the statistical properties of the model, assumptions and generalization. The second lecture will focus on estimation and interpretation of the estimates obtained from the model. The purpose of the computer classes is to develop programming tools to become a productive quantiative political scientist.

STV4358 - Comparative Political Institutions

Graduate course, University of Oslo, Department of Political Science, 2016

In this course, we compare how political institutions shape politics and policy-outcomes. In the first part of the course, we review spatial models before investigating approaches for identifying spatial positions of political actors and policies. In second part of the course, we apply these models and measurements to analyze government formation and duration; executive -legislative relations; and legislative coalition formation and organization. Empirically, the course will draw on insights from a range of political systems, including, but not limited to, the EU, US and national European nation-states. Students are expected to familiarize themselves with existing datasets and be able to rely on these for the assignments.

STV4027 - Causal inference and prediction

Graduate course, University of Oslo, Department of Political Science, 2017

This course introduces students to recent developments in the scholarly effort to derive causal explanations using quantitative methods. The bulk of the course will be concerned with how to identify and estimate causal effects in observational studies. It can be argued that this effort amounts to a paradigm shift within quantitative social science away from regression models and explained variance to identification and measurement of causal effects. Taking the randomized experiment as the ideal, we clarify the challenges faced by social scientists seeking to draw causal inferences from observational data. Units in observational studies usually select into their causal status (their ”treatment” status) through processes outside of the control of the researcher rather than being assigned to these causal states by the researcher, such as in controlled experiments. The characteristics of this selection process are central throughout the course. We present a range of approaches for identifying its’ core features and for drawing valid causal inferences given those features. In the process, we highlight the limitations and difficulties associated with causal estimates obtained via the different techniques. More than anything, the course aims to develop a critical, yet constructive, mindset towards claims of causal effects in observational studies The course will also give a brief introduction to basic techniques and concepts used for prediction purposes, and discuss how prediction differs from, and relates to, causal explanation. Together, causal inference and prediction constitute the two main activities of contemporary quantitative social science, and students of this course will be familiarized with the challenges and promises of both of them. Former title (before spring 2017): STV4027 - Causal Inference.