And the final speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Claudia Thoms, who will present a semantic analysis of party competition in Germany. She begins by noting that political competition is also a competition over language, with parties trying to establish a distinct political profile. Issue emphases and positioning leave races in language, while strategic framing also shapes political perception itself.
Different parties want to associate themselves with different issues, to emphasise their competence on these issues; this also responds to ebbs and flows in public attention to specific issues. But issue relevance does not equal consistent strategic relevance.
This study focusses on three key issues in German politics: climate and energy, migration, and pensions. These differ in public salience, with pensions least salient in recent debates; they also differ in issue ownership for specific parties. But how can these differences be made visible in the language of their speeches?
This project works with parliamentary speeches between October 2017 and December 2025; it focusses on the six parliamentary parties, and identifies relevance to specific topics through a keyword search. It compares the semantic choices of each party to the pattern for all other parties, and used the nearest neighbours of topic keywords per party to examine these patterns.
Attention to these issues in speeches ebbs and flows over time, and this broadly mirrors issue salience to the general public. There are clear differences between the parties: the Greens peak more about climate and energy, for instance, and the AfD more about migration. On climate and energy as well as migration the AfD’s semantic profile diverges considerably from all other parties; on pension, the left-wing Linke diverges most strongly. There is far less semantic differentiation between the other parties, even in spite of their own significant policy differences.
Such differentiation also increases during election periods, at least for climate and energy, and migration; for pensions this pattern does not hold. This might be due to the lower electoral salience of this issue. Overall, too, AfD and Linke tend to emphasise problems and their consequences, while more centrist parties discuss solutions and procedures instead.
Parties do differentiate through language, then, and this varies over time and across issues. It is broadly consistent with issue ownership theory, although not for climate issues, where the Greens would be expected to be more distinct in their language choices. Contextualised embeddings are a useful exploratory approach here.
Not all of this is driven by public salience, though, and overall media discourse may also drive patterns in parliamentary speeches. Broader and more longitudinal analysis, also including a broader range of political actors, might shed further light on this.
