A new research project has been approved by the VolkswagenStiftung. The research proposal was submitted by Professor Sabine Kropp and Antonios Souris (PhD) from the Chair of German Politics and Jan Schwalbach (PhD) from GESIS. 

Abstract

 

The data reuse project aims at editing a unique data collection that was initially gathered by qualitative content analysis in a research project, investigating German federalism in times of the Covid-19 crisis. In this project, 212 parliamentary debates on Covid-19, coded 4.610 statements made by the deputies in the German Bundestag and in the 16 state parliaments were analyzed and integrated into a new dataset that was subject to various quality checks. Due to the exceptional scope and careful qualitative coding, the existing data can be edited to construct a profound dictionary for automated text analysis (text-as-data). Beyond Covid-19, the dictionary enables a multifaceted data reuse for novel and relevant research projects. The dictionary may be used to investigate and compare German federal discourses over time. Moreover, the dictionary will be an innovative contribution to the comparative federalism literature, serving scholars who work on other federal systems as promising starting point for comparative research projects. The dictionary data will be published as open data in the data repository of GESIS (SowiDataNet|datorium) and become part of its collection of digital behavioral data.

 

The project will start in 2024 and is scheduled to run for 12 months.