Analysing German parliamentary debates: a special case of calls to order

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission3137 Authors

Abstract: Our research investigates incivility in parliamentary discourse, focusing on calls to order (CtO; plural: CtOs) in the German parliament. A notable gap exists in the analysis of CtOs in parliamentary discourse. Consequently, we propose a rule-based method to detect and annotate CtOs in parliamentary speeches and introduce a dataset of German parliamentary speeches spanning 72 years that include CtOs. Furthermore, this paper represents the first attempt to develop a classification system for the triggers of CtOs and to analyze the factors contributing to incivility in parliamentary discourse. Both statistical and empirical evidence suggest that despite strict regulations, the issuing of CtOs is often subjective, being significantly influenced by the session president and prevailing parliamentary trends. Thus, presidents of the parliament tend to call particular individuals to order preferentially. An insult towards individuals is the most frequent cause of CtO. Generally, male individuals and opposition party members receive more calls to order than their female and coalition party counterparts. Most of the CtO triggers were detected in speeches dedicated to governmental issues and presidency actions. Dataset is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/cto_analysis-D126/.

Paper Type: Short

Research Area: Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics

Research Area Keywords: sociolinguistics, NLP tools for social analysis, historical NLP, NLP for social good

Contribution Types: Data resources, Data analysis, Position papers

Languages Studied: German

Submission Number: 3137