Digitalisation and Demography in German labour policy debates

The German labour market is subject to challenges arising from the two megatrends of digitalisation and a changing demography, which is only exacerbated by the covid crisis. However, in the German Bundestag at least digitalisation does not seem to be discussed in the context of labour policies to a notable extent (Kemmerling & Gast Zepeda, forthcoming). In this paper, I explore to what extend labour policies and the labour market are discussed in relation to digitalisation and demography in the German parliament on the one hand, and in German language newspapers on the other. I rely on a subset of the Rauh et al. (2020) dataset covering Bundestag debates for 1991-2018 and on a sample of German newspaper excerpts. Through LDA topic modelling and hierarchical cluster analysis, I first identify topics and examine in which relation to each other they are discussed. In a second step, I compare the issue salience of digitalisation and a changing demography in labour policy debates both in parliament and in media coverage over time, and explore who sets the agenda when.