“Since Cologne”, and “after Chemnitz”—key events in German parliamentary discourse

Abstract

New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne and unrests in Chemnitz in 2018 are key events in recent German history that are closely linked to conflicts in migration an immigration policy. We evaluate how these events were processed in the parliamentary discourse in German state legislatures. To this end, we bring together qualitative and quantitative approaches to text analysis and analyze a comprehensive corpus of plenary debates that took place since the events at 2015–16 New Year’s Eve. Our quantitative text analysis shows that Köln and Chemnitz have long-lasting impact as points of reference in parliamentary discourse. With the help of a framing analysis we identify parties’ interpretative patterns. We find that the New Year’s Eve in Cologne has challenged, however, not fundamentally changed the partisan interpretative patterns. Chemnitz 2018, by contrast, reveals new partisan interpretations as well as an increasing polarization between the AfD and the established parties.