Blaming Across the Aisle: Political Contrasting and Blame Attribution in the Danish Parliament
A Danish Parliament study finds blame rhetoric rose after 2016, especially among right-wing parties.
This political-science study measures blame attribution in the Danish Parliament from 1997 to 2026 using BlameBERT, a classifier with an F1 of 0.80, and multilevel statistical models. Blame declined until around 2016 and then rose significantly from 2019 through 2026. Opposition parties blamed more than governing parties, while the dampening effect of being in government was weaker on the right, and recent years show a stronger link between ideological extremity and blame on the right. A sensitivity analysis found the conclusions stable across classification thresholds.
- BlameBERT classifies parliamentary blame with an F1 of 0.80.
- Blame declined until about 2016, then rose from 2019 to 2026.
- Opposition parties blame more than parties in government.
- The recent increase is stronger among right-wing parties.
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Political discourse is widely perceived to be growing more hostile, yet robust evidence remains scarce. This study examines blame attribution in the Danish Parliament from 1997 to 2026, combining a purpose-built classifier, BlameBERT (F1: 0.80), with multilevel statistical modeling. The classifier is constructed using an annotation-efficient pipeline for blame attribution in low-to-mid resource languages. The results reveal a banana-shaped trajectory, with blame declining until around 2016 before entering a significant and sustained increase in recent years (2019-2026). Government status consistently influenced blame attribution - an effect we term political contrasting - with opposition parties blaming substantially more than governing parties. This effect was moderated by ideology: The blame-dampening effect of governing was less pronounced among right-wing parties, and ideological extremity amplified blame more strongly on the right. In recent years, the interaction between political wing and ideological extremity intensified, suggesting an ideological hardening of the blame rhetoric concentrated on the right of the political spectrum. Taken together, these patterns suggest that the perceived rise in harsh political language reflects not merely a general rhetorical drift, but an ideologically asymmetric hardening of political discourse. A sensitivity analysis showed that the conclusions were robust to varying classification thresholds.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://huggingface.co/papers/2609.26346