Uncovering the secret life of We-pronouns in the German parliament: computational text analysis in a large-scale speech dataset

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. ISSN 0044-3409 (In Press)

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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- vs. 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
Official URL:	https://econtent.hogrefe.com/journal/zfp
Additional Information:	© 2024 Hogrefe
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:	18 Apr 2024 08:00
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/122414

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