The Populist Challenge in the German Parliaments

With the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a right-wing populist party has established itself in the party system of the Federal Republic for the first time. In view of this turning point, political science is called upon to analyse the conditions for the AfD's success and to understand how the party is changing democratic competition. Previous studies have already addressed these questions and offer important insights into the AfD's voters, programme, personnel and strategies, as well as its work in some state parliaments.

However, significant gaps in research remain. Since most studies focus on the AfD, little attention has been paid to how the established parties in parliament interact with the party (e.g. do they take up the AfD's issues or avoid them?) and how the parliamentary arena is changing overall (e.g. are parliamentary debates and votes becoming more confrontational?). In addition, existing studies are rooted in the literature on populism and make little use of the potential offered by research on parliamentary and party competition. Finally, comparative studies are limited in terms of the state parliaments they consider, behavioural indicators and the time periods they examine.

Our project aims to fill these gaps and pursues three specific objectives: firstly, it uses various indicators to compare the behaviour of the AfD in all state parliaments and the underlying preferences and strategies. Secondly, it analyses the interaction between the AfD and the established parliamentary groups. Thirdly, we draw on the literature on parliamentarism, populism and party competition to explain the findings on the behaviour of the AfD and the patterns of interaction in parliament. We focus in particular on rhetoric, the accentuation or framing of issues, positioning along abstract ideological dimensions, and specific policy issues. Empirically, we rely on a comprehensive evaluation of speeches, the most important forms of parliamentary scrutiny (e.g. minor interpellations), and explicit behavioural data (e.g., votes on selected issues).

We expect our project to yield empirical and methodological contributions: it will produce more comprehensive findings on the role of the AfD in state parliaments and the changes it has brought about, which will also make contributions to international comparative research on populist parties. Our project is particularly productive from an empirical perspective as it uses and further develops a unique, up-to-date dataset using machine text processing methods. The data obtained will enable us to systematically analyse the raised questions and will enable the scientific community to conduct further studies. Finally, the project will produce sturdy insights as it uses the latest quantitative and qualitative tools of text analysis deployed in computational social science and eHumanities.