Epistemic Capture - New Paper on Specialization in Dutch Parliament
Our latest research reveals how parliamentary debate in the Netherlands became progressively narrower between 1945 and 1995 as MPs turned into domain specialists. The paper “Epistemic capture through specialization in post-World War II parliamentary debate” is now available in Computational Humanities Research . We analyzed 8.2 million sentences from the Tweede Kamer using topic modeling and network analysis to trace what we call “epistemic capture”: the process by which a few experts increasingly constrained what could be discussed in parliament. Our findings show that debate became more compartmentalized after 1960, with network modularity nearly doubling while density fell. Cabinet turnovers acted as temporary “reset switches,” briefly disrupting established topic patterns before they reconsolidated along partisan lines. Certain policy domains (foreign affairs, agriculture, and education) formed enduring communities that locked topics and MPs together for decades.
Beyond its historical insights, the study introduces a transferable methodological approach for measuring structural transformations in democratic discourse, moving beyond simple word counts to examine the architecture of political debate itself.
Figure Caption: Topic Neighborhood Similarity (TNS) over time. The bottom panel shows average similarity for all topics, with vertical lines indicating cabinet changes. Top panels show three example topics: environmental management (rising similarity), international conflict (persistently high), and public broadcasting (persistently low).