This page lists my (current and past) academic research projects and publications.
My PhD research (Oxford University, passed without corrections January 2018), focused on measuring polarisation in the UK House of Commons on the basis of parliamentary speeches for the period 1811-2015, and investigated the determinants of reform to the House’s rules of debate for this time period. My dissertation is accessible online via the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA).
Goet, Niels. (2019). “The Politics of Procedural Choice: Standing Orders Reform in the UK House of Commons 1811-2015..” British Journal of Political Science. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123419000188.
Goet, Niels. (2019). “Measuring Polarisation with Text Analysis: Evidence from the UK House of Commons, 1811-2015.” Political Analysis https://doi.org/10.1017/pan.2019.2.
With Tom Fleming (Oxford University) and Radoslaw Zubek (Oxford University).
Recent research has shown an increasing interest in the historical evolution of legislative institutions. The development of the UK Parliament has received particularly extensive attention. In this article, we contribute to this literature in three important ways. First, we introduce a complete, machine‐readable data set of all the Standing Orders of the UK House of Commons between 1811 and 2015. Second, we demonstrate how this data set can be used to construct innovative measures of procedural change. Third, we illustrate a potential empirical application of the data set, offering an exploratory test of several expectations drawn from recent theories of formal rule change in parliamentary democracies. We conclude that the new data set has the potential to substantially advance our understanding of legislative reforms in the United Kingdom and beyond.
The research project “Parliamentary Careers in Comparison” aims to investigate political careers and activities of parliamentary candidates and parliamentarians in Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands since the Second World War. Based on an extensive collection of individual-level data, we investigate biographical and behavioural data to obtain a full and dynamic picture of parliamentary careers. The research interests covered by the project cover three broad areas. The first set of questions revolves around career paths on different levels, how they typically develop, and how these patterns can be explained. With the second set of questions we focus on the impact of political institutions on political careers while a third strand highlights the consequences of the different career paths on parliamentary behaviour and future post-parliamentary careers.
Frech, Elena, Niels Goet, and Simon Hug. (Forthcoming). “Shirking and Slacking in Parliament”. Legislative Studies Quarterly (conditionally accepted).