Pasi Ihalainen | University of Jyväskylä has been leading JYU Research Group on the Comparative Study of Political Cultures Research at the Department of History and Ethnology | University of Jyväskylä since 2012, developing it through his Academy of Finland Professor project Political Representation: Tensions between Parliament and the People from the Age of Revolutions to the 21st Century | University of Jyväskylä into an internationally recognised JYU Quantitative Conceptual History Research Group.
The group renews ways in which comparative history of political cultures is written in the 2020s, combining digital humanities, conceptual history and political theory to analyse transnational conceptual transformations. To write the long-term comparative history of representative democracy, it has collected data from ten countries and the European Parliament, building together with Utrecht University Research Software Lab the People & Parliament (P&P), an innovative, partly open interface for comparative historical text-mining. The metadata of the interface is available at JYX – People & Parliament: A Comparative Interface on Parliamentary Debates in Northwest Europe since the Nineteenth Century (jyu.fi) and an exemplary Dutch corpus at People & Parliament (uu.nl). The project aims to publish more corpora in the coming years. This work has attracted leading experts to visit the team.
The methodological textbook Writing Conceptual Histories, merging quantitative analysis to the theory of conceptual history, has been published by Bloomsbury Academic, https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/writing-conceptual-histories-9781350287198/ in Writing History series.
OrcID: 0000-0002-5468-4829
Recent publications are Nationalism and Internationalism Intertwined: A European History of Concepts Beyond the Nation State (New York: Berghahn Books 2022) edited with Antero Holmila and The Figure of the Politician in Modern and Contemporary Europe | BERGHAHN BOOKS (New York: Berghahn Books 2026) edited with Rosario López, Kari Palonen and Henk te Velde.
Supervision areas: history of political discourse, quantitative conceptual history, history of democracy and parliamentarism, history of nationalism and internationalism.