Understanding the approach towards Digitalisation in Policymaking in Germany

Digitalisation is one of the megatrends affecting many aspects of modern life and public policy all over the world. Previous findings (Kemmerling & Gast Zepeda, Forthcoming) suggest that in Germany, parliamentary speeches seem to have a rather narrow focus on infrastructure, data privacy and regulation, when discussing digitalisation. The way policymakers talk about digitalisation matters, as it reflects the way the digital transformation is shaped in Germany. The covid-19 pandemic has shed light on many shortcomings in the status quo of digitalisation in Germany, and consequently acted as a catalyst for digitalisation in many domains of private and public life. I aim to analyse how policymakers understand, approach and talk about digitalisation, and how this has changed since the covid-19 pandemic. To analyse parliamentary speeches that mention digitalisation, I rely on the Rauh & Schwalbach’s (2020) ParlSpeech V2 data set for 1991-2018 and scrape parliamentary speeches for 2019-2022 from the Bundestag website. I combine a higher-resolution (i.e. micro) and a lower-resolution (i.e. macro) approach to categorise the concepts and contexts in which digitalisation is discussed in the German parliament. I start with the lower-resolution approach, for which I use a topic modelling approach based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) (Blei et al. 2003; Roberts et al. 2014). In the next stage, I perform a hierarchical cluster analysis to identify how (dis)similar topics are to one other. Based on the topic terms from the topic model, I derive categories of the contexts in which parliamentarians talk about digitalisation in their speeches. I draw a random sample of speeches from the corpus, which I then analyse individually: I identify what aspects of digitalisation and what areas of application those speeches touch on and which definitions, concepts or understandings of digitalisation they imply. I then compare those to the categories identified previously and further develop the categorisation where necessary and adequate. In a final step I track if and how the main categories and contexts in which digitalisation is discussed among policymakers has changed over time.