Zeitenwenden: Detecting changes in the German political discourse
This work addresses the need for historians and political scientists to understand long-term shifts in German political discourse, though it is incremental as it applies an existing method to new data.
The researchers tackled the problem of tracking political discourse changes in Germany by analyzing digitized Bundestag plenary session texts from 1949 onward, using a time series variant of LDA to detect shifts in word frequency and key discussion points over time, with results identifying specific events that had lasting effects on topics.
From a monarchy to a democracy, to a dictatorship and back to a democracy -- the German political landscape has been constantly changing ever since the first German national state was formed in 1871. After World War II, the Federal Republic of Germany was formed in 1949. Since then every plenary session of the German Bundestag was logged and even has been digitized over the course of the last few years. We analyze these texts using a time series variant of the topic model LDA to investigate which events had a lasting effect on the political discourse and how the political topics changed over time. This allows us to detect changes in word frequency (and thus key discussion points) in political discourse.