Pasi Ihalainen | University of Jyväskylä has been leading JYU Research Group on the Comparative Study of Political Cultures Research at the Department of History and Ethnology | University of Jyväskylä since 2012, developing it through his Academy of Finland Professor project Political Representation: Tensions between Parliament and the People from the Age of Revolutions to the 21st Century | University of Jyväskylä into an internationally recognised JYU Quantitative Conceptual History Research Group.
The group renews ways in which comparative history of political cultures is written in the 2020s, combining digital humanities, conceptual history and political theory to analyse transnational conceptual transformations. To write the long-term comparative history of representative democracy, it has collected data from ten countries and the European Parliament, building together with Utrecht University Research Software Lab the People & Parliament (P&P), an innovative, partly open interface for comparative historical text-mining. The metadata of the interface is available at JYX – People & Parliament: A Comparative Interface on Parliamentary Debates in Northwest Europe since the Nineteenth Century (jyu.fi) and an exemplary Dutch corpus at People & Parliament (uu.nl). The project aims to publish more corpora in the coming years. This work has attracted leading experts to visit the team.
The methodological textbook Writing Conceptual Histories, merging quantitative analysis to the theory of conceptual history, is under production by Bloomsbury Academic, https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/writing-conceptual-histories-9781350287198/.
OrcID: 0000-0002-5468-4829
Recent publications are Nationalism and Internationalism Intertwined: A European History of Concepts Beyond the Nation State (New York: Berghahn Books 2022) edited with Antero Holmila and ‘A Model Country or a Peripheral Anomaly? The Finnish Women’s Suffrage and Female MPs in Transnational Debates, 1906-19’, in: T. Kaiser, & A. Schulz (eds.), Vorhang auf! – Frauen in Parlament und Politik . Beiträge zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteienrliament and Parliamentarism: a comparative history of a European concept 185 (Droste Verlag 2022) 55-72, with T. Kinnunen.
Supervision areas: history of political discourse, quantitative conceptual history, history of democracy and parliamentarism, history of nationalism and internationalism.