Post-democracy and Neoliberalism

This project has been ended.

On the usage of neoliberal argumentations in federal German politics between 1949 and 2011

The project „Post-democracy and Neoliberalism“ is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. In a joint cooperation with political scientists from the Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg the NLP group Leipzig seeks to identify momentous changes in justifications of politics in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The keyword „Post-democracy“ marks an intense and critical debate in political theory concerning tendencies of the recent development of liberal democracies. It is observed that markets more and more determine decisions in politics. Neoliberal agendas like deregulation and privatization are proclaimed without alternative. In the end this process leads to disenchantment with politics, lowered voter participation or rise of populist parties and social protest. The quality of democracy measured against an ideal of participation as free and equal as possible, seems to be shrinking.

The research project aims to evaluate these hypotheses of Post-Democracy empirically for Germany. We approach this with an discourse analysis of central neoliberal argumentations in newspaper discourse between 1949 and 2011. Qualitative assessment of the data is thereby complemented with quantitative analysis of the longitudinal media texts. Therefore we exploit more than 3,5 million German newspaper articles with different text mining tools.

Poster
Gerhard, Heyer; Schaal, Gary; Sebastian Dumm; Matthias Lemke; Andreas Niekler; Gregor Wiedemann (2013): Zur Nutzung neoliberaler Argumentationen in der bundesdeutschen Politik 1949–2011. Poster zum Kickoff-Workshop der eHumanities-Verbundprojekte 2013, 08./09. Arpil 2013, Leipzig. [Link to PDF]

Partner

Prof. Dr. Gary S. Schaal
Helmut-Schmidt-Universität Hamburg
Department of political theory
Postfach 700822
22008 Hamburg
http://www.hsu-hh.de/politiktheorie

Support program: Federal Ministry of Education and Research
Partner: Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg
Time frame: 05/2012 - 04/2015

Kontakt: Dr. Andreas Niekler, Dr. Gregor Wiedemann, Prof. Dr. Gerhard Heyer

Publications

• GW2012 - Opening up to Big Data: Computer-Assisted Analysis of Textual Data in Social Sciences
• WLN2013 - Postdemokratie und Neoliberalismus. Zur Nutzung neoliberaler Argumentationen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949-2011
• NWH14 - Leipzig Corpus Miner - A Text Mining Infrastructure for Qualitative Data Analysis
• WiNie14 - Document Retrieval for Large Scale Content Analysis using Contextualized Dictionaries
• HNW14 - Brauchen die Digital Humanities eine eigene Methodologie? Überlegungen zur systematischen Nutzung von Text Mining Verfahren in einem politikwissenschaftlichen Projekt
• NWDH14 - Creating dictionaries for argument identification by reference data
• LNSW15 - Content Analysis between Quality and Quantity. Fulfilling Blended-Reading Requirements for the Social Sciences with a Scalable Text Mining Infrastructure
• WN16 - Analyse qualitativer Daten mit dem „Leipzig Corpus Miner“
• LM16 - Text Mining in den Sozialwissenschaften. Grundlagen und Anwendungen zwischen qualitativer und quantitativer Diskursanalyse
• LM161 - Einleitung. Text Mining in den Sozialwissenschaften
• WL16 - Text Mining für die Analyse qualitativer Daten. Auf dem Weg zu einer Best Practice?
• W16b - Text Mining for Qualitative Data Analysis in the Social Sciences

Further informations