War in Parliament: What a Digital Approach Can Add to the Study of Parliamentary History

With the digitization of the parliamentary proceedings (Handelingen der Staten Generaal), the structuring of this body of data, and the development of an advanced search engine, we can apply new methods of historical research. This contributes to a further promotion of the sophisticated use of quantitative data to enhance qualitative historical research. This article focuses on the Boerenpartij(Farmers’ Party), the first political party from the far right that entered Dutch parliament after the Second World War (WWII). The Boerenpartij is remembered as being stigmatized by the traditional political parties as "wrong" (" fout "), as National Socialism and its supporters were dubbed in the Netherlands. However, no systematic research has been conducted on the questions: in what way, how frequently and for what purpose these connections with the "wrong" past were made. With the available digitized data and the retrieval techniques offered by computer scientists it is now possible to answer these questions.