Projects, Publications and Ongoing Work

Research Papers

How do elites view ideology? Analyzing candidates’ associations of left and right

(Ongoing work – Draft available upon request). Political ideology is a cornerstone of political science, yet measuring how political actors view ideology remains challenging. This paper argues that the attitudes towards “left” and “right” ideologies are asymmetrically biased across the German political spectrum, with left-leaning elites holding positive views of “left” and negative views of “right,” a pattern not mirrored among right-leaning elites. By analyzing sentiment in open-ended responses from GLES candidate surveys (2013, 2017, 2021), the study finds a persistent “left bias” among German candidates, suggesting the need to reconsider the left-right continuum due to its impact on political behavior and representation.

Open Discourse is a comprehensive project that processes every word spoken in the German Bundestag’s parliamentary sessions into a machine-readable format, encompassing nearly 900,000 speeches from 1949 to 2022. This paper introduces the database, comparing it to other parliamentary text corpora projects and highlighting its potential for political research through modern quantitative text analysis and political science research frameworks.

Building on the ParlGov database, ParlGov Dashboard is an R Shiny App that offers comprehensive information on political parties, elections, and cabinets. This dashboard allows for the viewing and downloading of detailed visualizations and tables, with the source code available on GitHub.

This R package provides functions for descriptive statistics and various analyses using the Open Discourse database. The package offers functions to plot and analyze the data descriptively. The source code is available on GitHub.