Party Strategies in Federal Systems: A Dictionary-Based Analysis of Parliamentary Discourses in Germany

Federal systems create complex institutional settings that foster cooperation while simultaneously enabling self-serving and opportunistic political behavior. These conflicting incentives are particularly salient for political parties. As “one of the very important political actors that produce the linkages between the political institutions” (Deschouwer 2003, 220), we argue that parties have to make sense of institutional incentives and translate them into political strategies. Focusing on parliamentary discourses, we show that parties employ different discursive strategies that integrate both the need for collaboration and the possibility of self-interest (Souris et al. 2024). To empirically investigate party strategies within the context of German federalism, we have developed a new dictionary for automated text analysis. Dictionaries are “sets of keywords in predefined categories corresponding to certain concepts, and often used in quantitative analysis as a robust theory-driven method” (Watanabe & Zhou 2022, 348). They provide a powerful tool for examining discursive patterns in large text corpora. The paper details the dictionary's construction process, offering a replicable framework for researchers seeking to analyze similar phenomena in other contexts. In the empirical investigation, the dictionary will be applied to a novel text corpus that includes all legislative debates in the German subnational parliaments since 2000 (Beltermann et al. 2024). By identifying patterns across numerous observations, our approach reveals how federal institutions both shape and are shaped by parties’ strategic choices and behavior. The empirical investigation also sheds light on the broader implications for the federal system, as the parties’ strategies can alter the functioning of federal institutions. Literature: Beltermann, E., Souris, A., Nguyen, C., & Kropp, S. (2024). StateParl (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. GESIS Data Archive. doi: 10.7802/2744 Deschouwer, K. (2003). Political Parties in Multi-Layered Systems. European Urban and Regional Studies, 10(3), 213–226. doi: 10.1177/09697764030103003 Souris, A., Kropp, S., & Nguyen, C. (2024). Navigating Conflicting Incentives: Discursive Strategies of Political Parties in Germany’s Cooperative Federalism. Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 54(4), 656–682. doi: 10.1093/publius/pjae024 Watanabe, K. & Y. Zhou (2022): Theory-Driven Analysis of Large Corpora: Semisupervised Topic Classification of the UN Speeches. Social Science Computer Review, 40 (2), 346-366. doi: 10.1177/0894439320907027