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Icelandic politics are analysed from the perspectives of three normative models of democracy: the liberal, republican and deliberative democratic theories. While the Icelandic constitution is rooted in classical liberal ideas, Icelandic politics can be harshly criticized from a liberal perspective, primarily because of the unclear separation of powers of government and for the extensive involvement of politics in other social sectors. Despite strong nationalist discourse which reflects republican characteristics, rooted in the struggle for independence from Denmark, republicanism has been marginal in Icelandic politics. In the years before the financial collapse, Icelandic society underwent a process of liberalization in which power shifted to the financial sector without disentangling the close ties that had prevailed between business and politics. The special commission set up by the Icelandic Parliament to investigate the causes of the financial collapse criticized Icelandic politics and governance for its flawed working practices and lack of professionalism. The appropriate lessons to draw from this criticism are to strengthen democratic practices and institutions. In the spirit of republicanism, however, the dominant discourse about Icelandic democracy after the financial collapse has been on increasing direct, vote-centric participation in opposition to the system of formal politics. While this development is understandable in light of the loss of trust in political institutions in the wake of the financial collapse, it has not contributed to trustworthy practices. In order to improve Icelandic politics, the analysis in this paper shows, it is important to work more in the spirit of deliberative democratic theory ; Peer Reviewed

The paper analyzes the rulings of the Supreme Court of iceland in rape cases after changes in the penal code in 1992 and 2007. The study employs discourse analysis in which legitimizing principles are identified. The aim of the paper is to explore whether victim blaming, misogyny or other such attitudes are reflected in the rul­ings. The paper concludes that the rulings' focus is mainly on physical abuse and violence although less emphasis is put on that after the changes in the penal code. Mental harm caused by rape is often given little attention or even completely igno­red. One main conclusion is that rape myths are reflected in the rulings and victim blaming is common although it is decreasing. it is also apparent that the emphasis on victim blaming diminishes if the perpetrator is of foreign origin.

The article recounts the account from the Árna saga about Loftur Helgason's trip to Bergen in 1282 and his stay there over winter, explained in terms of the formal sources about the organization of the government and changes in the law in the latter half of the 13th century. These changes were aimed at introducing into Iceland the power of both the King and the Church and in fact marked the actual changes throughout the Norwegian state. Loftur was Skálholt's official and the story about him was part of a long-standing dispute about the position of the chieftains versus the new power of the Church and the opposition to its introduction. The article defines the political confusion described in the Árna sagain Bergen in the winter of 1282-1283 as, on the one hand, changes in the constitution and, on the other hand, legislation, and at the same time whether the Kings Hákon Hákonarson and his son Magnús had systematically pursued a policy of having the Church be an independent party to the government of the state from 1247 onward until the death of the latter in 1280. When the disagreement is looked at as continuing, it is seen that Icelanders had made preparations for changes in the constitution with assurances of introduction of the power of the Church beginning in 1253 and the power of the King from 1262, but, on the other hand, the disagreements in both countries disappeared in the 1270s in the face of the conflict of interests that resulted from the laws that followed in the wake of the constiututional changes. Árna saga tell of this and how the disputes were described, but also that their nature changed as King Erikur came to power in 1280, as he gave the power of the King a new policy that was aimed against the power of the Church. Ousting of the archbishop from Norway and the Christian funerals of the excommunicated chieftains are examples of the conditions of government that could not have been, if the King had no longer had executive power over Christian concerns, as he had already conceded power over spiritual issues to the Pope in Rome with the Settlement at Túnsberg in 1277.

This chapter explores the possible influences of Sweden, Denmark and Finland on the Environmental Policy of the EU. We focus specifically on the reputation, expertise and role model behaviour of the Nordic EU members and their possibilities to use these factors as cognitive power resources.The chapter discusses several examples where the Nordic EU member states have successfully promoted their national environmental interests within the EU. We also make use of interviews with environmental representatives at the Swedish, Danish and Finnish Permanent Representations to the EU in Brussels, officials from other member states, DG Environment of the Commission and the European Environment Agency. The results indicate that the Nordic EU members have to some extent minimised their quantitative disadvantages, such as small administrations and limited voting powers, by successfully using the cognitive power resources in question within the Environmental Policy of the European Union.

The aim of this article is to discuss two contemporary Icelandic novels, Kata by Steinar Bragi and Gott fólk by Valur Grettisson, in connection to interpretations of revenge literature and films in the field of Law and literature. Both novels deal with shortcomings in the legal system and judiciary in dealing with and proving crimes involving rape and sexual abuse. This analysis focuses on how the two novels are connected to the advocacy for change, both for the legislator and the judicial system in Iceland. The novel Kata is named after the protagonist, whose daughter is kidnapped, raped and murdered. Kata decides to revenge her daughter and murder the perpetrators, one by one. Throughout the story the reader is made aware of the necessity of avenge, but still the question of righteousness remains. In Gott fólk the narrator, Sölvi, is put through the accountability process by Sara and her friends, after she accuses him of both mental and sexual misconduct during the time of their relationship. Sölvi experiences the process as revenge, but to the reader it is clear that he is guilty and cannot cope with that realization. The two novels offer a basis for discussion on sexual offence, the legal system, revenge and justice.

ParlaMint is a multilingual set of comparable corpora containing parliamentary debates mostly starting in 2015 and extending to mid-2020, with each corpus being about 20 million words in size. The sessions in the corpora are marked as belonging to the COVID-19 period (after October 2019), or being "reference" (before that date). The corpora have extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); are structured into time-stamped terms, sessions and meetings; with speeches being marked by the speaker and their role (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also contain marked-up transcriber comments, such as gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. Note that some corpora have further information, e.g. the year of birth of the speakers, links to their Wikipedia articles, their membership in various committees, etc. The corpora are encoded according to the Parla-CLARIN TEI recommendation (https://clarin-eric.github.io/parla-clarin/), but have been validated against the compatible, but much stricter ParlaMint schemas. This entry contains the ParlaMint TEI-encoded corpora with the derived plain text version of the corpus along with TSV metadata on the speeches. Also included is the 2.0 release of the data and scripts available at the GitHub repository of the ParlaMint project. Note that there also exists the linguistically marked-up version of the corpus, which is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1405.

ParlaMint 2.1 is a multilingual set of 17 comparable corpora containing parliamentary debates mostly starting in 2015 and extending to mid-2020, with each corpus being about 20 million words in size. The sessions in the corpora are marked as belonging to the COVID-19 period (after November 1st 2019), or being "reference" (before that date). The corpora have extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); are structured into time-stamped terms, sessions and meetings; with speeches being marked by the speaker and their role (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also contain marked-up transcriber comments, such as gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. Note that some corpora have further information, e.g. the year of birth of the speakers, links to their Wikipedia articles, their membership in various committees, etc. The corpora are encoded according to the Parla-CLARIN TEI recommendation (https://clarin-eric.github.io/parla-clarin/), but have been validated against the compatible, but much stricter ParlaMint schemas. This entry contains the ParlaMint TEI-encoded corpora with the derived plain text version of the corpus along with TSV metadata on the speeches. Also included is the 2.0 release of the data and scripts available at the GitHub repository of the ParlaMint project. Note that there also exists the linguistically marked-up version of the corpus, which is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1431.

ParlaMint is a multilingual set of comparable corpora containing parliamentary debates mostly starting in 2015 and extending to mid-2020, with each corpus being about 20 million words in size. The sessions in the corpora are marked as belonging to the COVID-19 period (after October 2019), or being "reference" (before that date). The corpora have extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); are structured into time-stamped terms, sessions and meetings; with speeches being marked by the speaker and their role (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also contain marked-up transcriber comments, such as gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. Note that some corpora have further information, e.g. the year of birth of the speakers, links to their Wikipedia articles, their membership in various committees, etc. The corpora are encoded according to the Parla-CLARIN TEI recommendation (https://clarin-eric.github.io/parla-clarin/), but have been validated against the compatible, but much stricter ParlaMint schemas. This entry contains the linguistically marked-up version of the corpus, while the text version is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1388. The ParlaMint.ana linguistic annotation includes tokenization, sentence segmentation, lemmatisation, Universal Dependencies part-of-speech, morphological features, and syntactic dependencies, and the 4-class CoNLL-2003 named entities. Some corpora also have further linguistic annotations, such as PoS tagging or named entities according to language-specific schemes, with their corpus TEI headers giving further details on the annotation vocabularies and tools. The compressed files include the ParlaMint.ana XML TEI-encoded linguistically annotated corpus; the derived corpus in CoNLL-U with TSV speech metadata; and the vertical files (with registry file), suitable for use with CQP-based concordancers, such as CWB, noSketch Engine or KonText. Also included is the 2.0 release of the data and scripts available at the GitHub repository of the ParlaMint project.

ParlaMint 2.1 is a multilingual set of 17 comparable corpora containing parliamentary debates mostly starting in 2015 and extending to mid-2020, with each corpus being about 20 million words in size. The sessions in the corpora are marked as belonging to the COVID-19 period (from November 1st 2019), or being "reference" (before that date). The corpora have extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); are structured into time-stamped terms, sessions and meetings; with speeches being marked by the speaker and their role (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also contain marked-up transcriber comments, such as gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. Note that some corpora have further information, e.g. the year of birth of the speakers, links to their Wikipedia articles, their membership in various committees, etc. The corpora are encoded according to the Parla-CLARIN TEI recommendation (https://clarin-eric.github.io/parla-clarin/), but have been validated against the compatible, but much stricter ParlaMint schemas. This entry contains the linguistically marked-up version of the corpus, while the text version is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1432. The ParlaMint.ana linguistic annotation includes tokenization, sentence segmentation, lemmatisation, Universal Dependencies part-of-speech, morphological features, and syntactic dependencies, and the 4-class CoNLL-2003 named entities. Some corpora also have further linguistic annotations, such as PoS tagging or named entities according to language-specific schemes, with their corpus TEI headers giving further details on the annotation vocabularies and tools. The compressed files include the ParlaMint.ana XML TEI-encoded linguistically annotated corpus; the derived corpus in CoNLL-U with TSV speech metadata; and the vertical files (with registry file), suitable for use with CQP-based concordancers, such as CWB, noSketch Engine or KonText. Also included is the 2.1 release of the data and scripts available at the GitHub repository of the ParlaMint project. As opposed to the previous version 2.0, this version corrects some errors in various corpora and adds the information on upper / lower house for bicameral parliaments. The vertical files have also been changed to make them easier to use in the concordancers.