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Computational Political Landscape of the Netherlands and Prime Minister Schoof’s Position

This study presents a computational model of the Dutch political landscape during the Schoof government period, constructed using debate speeches from the House of Representatives. We construct a two-dimensional representation of the Dutch political landscape by fine-tuning a BERT model on parliamentary debate speeches and applying dimensionality reduction techniques to the resulting embeddings. We evaluate the validity of this model by comparing it to an independently developed model from an external research institute, finding that both models reveal similar patterns along the socio‑economic left–right dimension. We also examine content patterns and word frequency distributions in targeted samples located at distinct regions of the landscape to interpret the model. We further evaluate the stability of the landscape to ensure that the observed patterns are not driven by random variation. Finally, we position Prime Minister Schoof within this computational landscape. Schoof was intended to be a neutral Prime Minister without any party affiliation that would represent the coalition parties of the government equally. Our analysis will show whether Schoof was indeed neutral in his statements or not.