ANR / Decidon

Tracing the long-term interactions between Parliament and the press in shaping public issue agendas during the French Third Republic

DECIDON aims to analyze how public issues were placed on the political agenda by the Parliament of the Third Republic (1870–1940). At that time, parliamentarians enjoyed a high degree of autonomy in setting the agenda for their debates, and parliamentary discussions appear to have followed their own lifecycle, largely unaffected by the day-to-day fluctuations of public opinion as reflected in the press. However, historical research has highlighted the complex relationships between the press and Parliament, as well as the constant dynamics of influence between these two arenas. In order to better understand how this political regime functioned, while shedding further light on the everyday work of parliamentarians, it is therefore necessary to assess to what extent the agenda-setting of public issues was shaped by the choices of deputies—and by power dynamics within the parliamentary arena—or, conversely, by the press, which embodied and structured public opinion at the time. Such a study requires analyzing the circulation of political discourse between the press and Parliament over the long term, which in turn involves exploring large corpora of digitized historical documents. DECIDON will both enhance the value of digitized French parliamentary debate corpora and develop a complete, open pipeline for processing historical corpora, from corpus creation to online publication as enriched FAIR data. Grounded in historical analysis, the results will be obtained by combining computer vision methods with natural language processing techniques. DECIDON will demonstrate that critical steps such as document layout analysis, OCR, and named entity recognition are now within reach using open, ready-to-use solutions. It also aims to provide fine-grained modeling of political discourse, drawing in particular on the capabilities of large language models.