The research project
How do political decision-makers and social actors understand solidarity? Is it possible to identify patterns in communication at the political, social and individual level that point to either increased or decreased solidarization or to the pluralisation of solidarity discourses? How resilient is a society’s understanding of solidarity and what could be a potential communication strategy to counter the erosion of solidarity? Do discourses on solidarity at the political level correlate with discourses at the individual or social level?
The interdisciplinary research consortium at the University of Hildesheim explores these and similar questions. Researchers from the divisions of political science and sociology of the Institute of Social Sciences and of the Institute for Information Science and Speech Technology cooperate in four sub-projects: the micro level (project headed by Prof. Kneuer) covers online and offline communication of residents; the meso level analyses communication of societal actors (project headed by Prof. Corsten) and the macro level covers communication of political decision makers (project headed by Prof. Schammann). Instruments from the field of computational linguistics (project headed by Prof. Heid) will help realise and supplement the discourse analysis conducted at the three levels.
The project lasts for three years and is funded by the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower-Saxony and VolkswagenStiftung.
Sub-project 3: the macro level
Sub-project 3 aims at analyzing the understanding of solidarity as it can be derived from political deliberation on solidarity in the context of migration (the macro level). We want to pinpoint different conceptions of solidarity, delimit them from each other and trace their development over the past four and a half centuries. To this end, we examine the communication on solidarity by political actors, including speeches given during plenary sessions of Bundestag und Bundesrat. In a second step, we analyse speeches given during plenary sessions of the parliaments of the federal states, as well as by members of the federal and regional governments and by political parties. Finally, we take into account statements of politically active civil society organisations or activists with respect to certain individual aspects, should it not be possible to rely on data of sub-projects 1 and 2.
The analysis at the macro level covers the time period between November 1973 – the moment the federal government decided to discontinue the recruitment of foreign labour (within the framework of the “guestworker” agreements) – and December 2019. We are particularly interested in the questions of if and why the prominence of certain conceptions of solidarity varies over the years. To put it differently: do specific events come along with particular understandings of solidarity? The period of investigation encompasses numerous migration phenomena and political and legal reactions that have triggered vivid discussions in the public and political realm, including the debates on family reunification (both in the 1970s and 80s and today), the Residence Act of 2004, the removal of limitations to the freedom of movement after the 2004 and 2007 EU enlargement, and the arrival of increased numbers of persons seeking international protection (mid-1980s, 2015/2016), to mention but a few examples. We are interested in the question of whether some of the debates were accompanied by intensified communication on solidarity. To this end, we conduct a discourse analysis which is realised with the help of instruments from the field of computational linguistics.
The macro project divides into three building blocks:
Clara Hoppe
Elisabeth Knoche
Anabel Röpcke
Laura Wörner
January 2019 - December 2021
<link soldisk/en/>www.uni-hildesheim.de/soldisk/en/</link>
Ziegler, Franziska & Schammann, Hannes (2021): Detecting Theoretical Concepts in Large Corpora. Solidarity in the plenary debates of the German Bundestag. MPRG Working Paper 02/2021.