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, 232 (3). 200 - 208. ISSN 0044-3409

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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
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:	14 Sep 2024 09:55
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/122414

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