Uncovering the Secret Life of We-Pronouns in the German Parliament

Abstract

Abstract: In social and political psychology, pronoun use, especially “we”, plays an important role reflecting social identity and predicting leadership success in the political realm and beyond. Previous research focused on top-level political leaders and word-counting methods. We examined We-language and reelection success based on 349,783 speeches from 3,630 members of the German federal parliament from 1949 to 2021. We combined traditional We-counts with new Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to explore syntactic and semantic contexts. We-language predicted next-term reelections and total number of reelections from the frontbench to the backbench and across many social and political factors. There were differential effects for We-language versus Our-language, We-specification, and We-categories. Our study revealed an upward trend of We-language in the parliament in recent decades. This research illustrates the use of new large-scale speech datasets and NLP-based tools for language and leadership research. We give valuable insights into the subtle language behind successful leadership.