Applause and interjections as tools of party competition: Evidence from 70 years of debates in the German Bundestag (Revise & Resubmit)

Andreas Küpfer, Jochen Müller, Christian Stecker

Abstract

(Dis)agreement and salience are key components of explanations in political science. Several approaches such as expert surveys and quantitative text analysis provide useful measures of these concepts. We show that further measures can be gained from an often overlooked part of debates: non-verbal (e.g. applause, laughter) or verbal (short statements) acts of members of parliament. The frequency, intensity and directions of these acts paint a fine-grained picture of salience, conflict and polarization of political issues and cycles in coalition mood, inter-party relations and elections. ‘In our proof of concept’, we explore this potential of using a novel corpus of all debates of the German Bundestag between 1949 and 2021.

Type
Preprint
Publication
Andreas Küpfer, Jochen Müller and Christian Stecker, n.d. "Exploring (dis)agreement and salience with applause and interjections. Evidence from the German Bundestag, 1979-2021" Manuscript in preparation.
Party Competition Parliamentary Speeches text-as-data Applause
Andreas Küpfer

I am a PhD candidate at the Technical University of Darmstadt, working at the intersection of Data Science and Political Science. Before that, I graduated from the University of Mannheim with a M.Sc. in Data Science. My research focuses on (multimodal) political communication, combining machine learning models with traditional methods to address substantive questions related to party competition and political behaviour. My work has been published in European Journal of Political Research, Political Analysis, and Political Science Research an Methods.