Bachmann, Robin and Gleibs, Ilka H. ORCID: 0000-0002-9913-250X (2024) Uncovering the secret life of We-pronouns in the German parliament: computational text analysis in a large-scale speech dataset. Zeitschrift fur Psychologie / Journal of Psychology, 232 (3). 200 - 208. ISSN 2190-8370
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Abstract
In social and political psychology, pronoun use, especially we , plays an important role reflecting social identity and predicting leadership success in the political realm and beyond. Previous research focused on top-level political leaders and word-counting methods. We examined We-language and reelection success based on 349,783 speeches from 3,630 members of the German federal parliament from 1949 to 2021. We combined traditional We-counts with new Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to explore syntactic and semantic contexts. We-language predicted next-term reelections and total number of reelections from the frontbench to the backbench and across many social and political factors. There were differential effects for We-language versus Our-language, We-specification, and We-categories. Our study revealed an upward trend of We-language in the parliament in recent decades. This research illustrates the use of new large-scale speech datasets and NLP-based tools for language and leadership research. We give valuable insights into the subtle language behind successful leadership.
Item Type: | Article |
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Official URL: | https://econtent.hogrefe.com/journal/zfp |
Additional Information: | © 2024 The Author(s) |
Divisions: | Psychological and Behavioural Science |
Subjects: | H Social Sciences B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology J Political Science |
Date Deposited: | 18 Mar 2024 15:12 |
Last Modified: | 05 Dec 2024 18:03 |
URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/122414 |
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