The "Forging Solidarity" project is connected to other projects about related topics. We are working together on questions of common interest, and we are cooperating in developing data sources and methods.
The project "Values in Political Communication” is motivated by the observation that socio-structural factors (such as class) have become less relevant in determining individuals’ voting behavior. This means, appeals towards social groups that reflect the class structure become a less effective tool of political communication. We argue that parties should rely more on value-based justifications instead. In the project, we develop and apply tools to identify political explanations in large text corpora and evaluate them using automated methods regarding the use of group- and value appeals.
The project focuses on political justifications and excuses during critical phase (January 2020 to May 2022) of the Covid-19 pandemic. It analyses party discourse and policy responses during the Covid-19 pandemic. To analyze these rhetorical strategies, the project applies different text-as-data approaches. Currently, the main data sources of the project are press releases from German political parties. The project uses a newly collected dataset of more than 50,000 press releases published party fractions that are represented in either the German Bundestag or one of the 16 Landesparlamente.
In its post-functionalist stage of intense politicization that challenges the European Union, its policies, and its authority, European integration needs to be explained. This is also an imperative of democratic accountability, given the increased significance of integration policies with their considerably larger and more immediate effects on the lives of European citizens. Convincing justifications raise support for integration, and in the era of post-functionalism support for integration is needed to facilitate it. But how good are politicians at explaining integration and what explains differences in how they do it? Does variation in how politicians explain integration affect the nature of political competition, and does political competition structure the content of rhetoric?
The project relies on automated text analysis to identify how politicians justify European integration across a wide range of debates and countries. We collect data about the policies politicians endorse, the norms they invoke, and the causal connections between policies and norms they establish. We explain variation in the content and quality of justifications by testing the effects of institutional environment, dynamics of political competition, as well as the features of political parties and individual legislators.