Zeitenwenden: Detecting changes in the German political discourse

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the evolution of German political discourse over time by applying a time series topic model to Bundestag texts, revealing how key topics and discussions shifted with political changes.

Contribution

It introduces a time series variant of LDA to detect and analyze long-term changes in political discourse from digitized Bundestag records.

Findings

Identified significant shifts in political topics over decades.

Detected lasting effects of major political events on discourse.

Mapped the evolution of key discussion points in German politics.

Abstract

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.