The award was granted for the paper “Who Refers to Science? Understanding the Salience of Scientific Evidence in Parliamentary Debates.” The study examines how often, and under what conditions, politicians refer to scientific evidence in parliamentary speeches across six European countries: Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Drawing on a dataset of 30,000 parliamentary speeches, the paper analyzes how country-level, party-level, issue-level, and speaker-level factors shape the salience of scientific evidence in political debate. The findings suggest that institutional roles, policy contexts, and organizational routines are more important for explaining evidence use in parliamentary debates than national context or ideology.
The paper is currently availlable as a preprint: doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/xh9m7_v1
