Blaming Across the Aisle: Political Contrasting and Blame Attribution in the Danish Parliament

Blaming Across the Aisle. Political Contrasting and Blame Attribution in the Danish Parliament. By Markus Lundsfryd Jensen and three others, from Aarhus University and the Center for Humanities Computing. Published on the twenty-second of September. Its code repository is public and real: about thirty-five source files.

Political discourse is widely seen as growing more hostile, yet solid evidence is scarce. This study looks at blame attribution in the Danish Parliament, from the late nineties through to two thousand and twenty-six. Its claim is that the rise in harsh political language is not just a general drift in rhetoric. It is a hardening that is ideologically asymmetric, concentrated on the right. That distinction matters for how the change is understood. A general drift would touch every party alike. An asymmetric hardening points to particular parts of the political spectrum.

The tool is a purpose-built classifier, BlameBERT, with an F1 of zero point eight, combined with multilevel statistical modelling. The classifier comes from an annotation-efficient pipeline for detecting blame in low-to-mid resource languages. Over time, blame follows a banana-shaped trajectory. It declines until around two thousand and sixteen, then enters a significant and sustained increase from two thousand and nineteen onward. So the popular sense of rising hostility is borne out for recent years, but the longer record is not a straight climb. For much of the period, blame was falling.

Government status consistently shapes blame. Opposition parties blame substantially more than governing parties, and the authors name this effect political contrasting. Ideology moderates it. Being in government dampens blame less among right-wing parties, and ideological extremity amplifies blame more strongly on the right. In recent years the interaction between political wing and ideological extremity has intensified. The authors read that as an ideological hardening of blame rhetoric, concentrated on the right of the political spectrum.

The evidence is from one parliament, the Danish one, measured through one classifier. A sensitivity analysis showed that the conclusions held across varying classification thresholds. That check matters because every measurement in the study passes through the classifier. If the patterns had depended on where the line between blame and no blame was drawn, they would say more about the tool than about the parliament.

The finding refines a common perception rather than simply confirming it. Blame has risen recently, but not evenly across the chamber. Where one sits relative to government, and how far from the centre, shapes how much one blames, and in recent years that pattern has sharpened on the right.