The Bundeswehr in German Newspaper Coverage – Using Text Mining for Analysing Strategic Culture

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War, the international tasks of the Bundeswehr have become central issues of intense domestic debates in Germany. Thereby, the question of out-of-area missions has been a controversial issue for a long time. Against this backdrop, the article analyses the media coverage of the German Bundeswehr. Based on the strategic culture approach, we try to identify changes in the semantic fields connected to the Bundeswehr in articles from four leading German newspapers in the period 1990–2011. To handle the large amount of articles we use text mining methods summed up under the label of distant reading. Since these methods are not yet commonly used in political science research, testing selected distant reading approaches is an additional aim of this article.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Leipzig Corpus Miner (LCM) was developed within the joint research project ‘ePol – Postdemokratie und Neoliberalismus’ (Institute for Political Science, specialisation on Political Theory at Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg and the Natural Language Processing Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig). The authors would like to thank the ePol team for giving us the opportunity to use the LCM and its newspaper corpus for the following analysis.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

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

Notes

1 The LCM was developed within the joint research project ‘ePol – Postdemokratie und Neoliberalismus’ (www.epol-projekt.de; Institute for Political Science, specialisation on Political Theory at Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg and the Natural Language Processing Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig). The authors would like to thank the epol team for giving us the opportunity to use the LCM and its newspaper corpus for the following analysis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Florence Reiter

Prof. Dr Daniel Göler is Jean-Monnet Professor for European Politics at the University of Passau. His main research interests include EU policy-making, German European Policy, the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the EU and regional integration in Southeast Europe.

Florence Reiter, MA is PhD candidate and research associate for European Politics at the University of Passau. Her main areas of research include strategic European foreign security and defence policy, strategic culture, political communication and the application of text mining methods in the field of political science research.