Ideological Talk, Strategic Vote: German Parties’ Positions on the Military Intervention in Afghanistan in Parliament

ABSTRACT

Existing literature has examined party positions on several military interventions across various countries, mostly using manifestos and expert surveys as sources of data. This article employs a different approach by analysing German parties’ positions on one mission only: the Afghanistan intervention (2001–2021). We extract positions from parliamentary speeches through the automated text scaling method Wordfish and compare them with voting data to check public speech against behaviour. We find that moderate parties were more in favour of the intervention than extreme parties. We also highlight the presence of a strong government/opposition conflict. This dynamic was amplified in the votes as both government and opposition parties have more incentives to act strategically, while surprisingly, we find little evidence of differences in positioning across missions. Other than being the first comprehensive assessment of parties’ positions on the intervention in Afghanistan in any country, this article offers a methodological contribution to the study of the party politics of peace and security operations.

Acknowledgements

Falk Ostermann has done most of the work for this article while working at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. Special thanks go to our research assistants Elisabeth Alm and Stephan Friebe at JLU for preparing the parliamentary data for analysis. We are also grateful to Cornelia Baciu and two anonymous reviewers for many useful suggestions for improving the manuscript. All mistakes remain of our own.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For an overview of text as data methods see Benoit (2020).

2 During the timeframe of our analysis, there have been three different governing coalitions in Germany: SPD-Greens (1998-2005), CDU/CSU-SPD (2005-2009), CDU/CSU-FDP (2009-2013), and again CDU-SPD (2013-2021).

3 For the description of MPs’ speeches divided by party in government and mission, see Table A1 in the Appendix.

4 For a description of party-level votes, divided by mission, see Table A3 in the Appendix.

5 Examples of non-discriminating words (highest scores for the psi parameter, values close to zero for the beta parameter) are ‘Afghanistan’, ‘soldiers’ (‘soldaten’), ‘german armed forces’ (‘bundeswehr’), and the name of the missions (‘resolute’ and ‘support’ or ‘enduring’ and ‘freedom’).

6 For the precise position scores, see Table A4 in the Appendix. As a robustness check, we replicated the analysis with Wordscores, a supervised scaling method, using the scores contained in the ‘International Security’ variable in the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) as anchors (Bakker et al. 2015). This variable specifically assesses the ‘position towards international security and troop deployments’, ranging from 0 (strongly in favour) to 10 (strongly against). We assigned a score only to the documents of the parties with the presumedly most distant positions in the CHES variable: CDU/CSU and Die Linke. The correlation of these positions with the positions extracted with Wordfish is rather strong. As a further robustness check, we replicated the analysis with Wordfish with stemmed documents. The correlation between position scores is very strong. For the correlation tables, see Tables A5 A6 in the Appendix.

7 For the precise share of yes-votes, see Table A7 in the Appendix.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Valerio Vignoli

Valerio Vignoli is a Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Milan. His research focuses on the impact of domestic factors on foreign policy, mostly employing quantitative methods. His articles have been published in various journals including International Peacekeeping, West European Politics, and Foreign Policy Analysis.

Falk Ostermann

Falk Ostermann is a Lecturer at Kiel University. He studies the domestic contestation of foreign policy with a focus on military interventions. He is the author of Security, Defense Discourse and Identity in NATO and Europe. How France Changed Foreign Policy (Routledge, 2019) and of Die NATO (UVK/UTB, 2020). Amongst others, he has published in the European Political Science Review, Foreign Policy Analysis, or West European Politics.

Wolfgang Wagner

Wolfgang Wagner is Professor of International Security at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research focuses on liberal democracies’ foreign and security policy. His recent publications include The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions. Political Parties, Contestation and Decisions to Use Force Abroad, Oxford University Press 2020.