Striving for discourse or propagating partisan narratives? The tweeting behavior of members of parliament in the first ˈpost-Merkelˈ election campaign.

This paper examines to what extent 425 members of the German Bundestag (MPs) put their parties’ narratives first in their tweets in the run-up to the general election of 2021. My guiding hypothesis is that MPs in general but especially from the green party and the populist AfD, located at opposite poles of the political spectrum, propagate partisan narratives in terms of themes and frames rather than seeking inter partisan discourse or promoting personal views (e.g., Enli & Skogerbø 2013, Himelboim et al. 2013). The analysis focuses on MPs’ tweeting behavior between 1 July and 31 August, examining more than 20K tweets. Each MP tweeted on average 48.6 times during this period. First, the paper will employ a Structural Topic Model (STM) to show the themes MPs tweeted about and the factors that predicted these themes. Regarding the predictors, the analysis will compare the influence of party affiliation, individual account, and real-world events. The STM, which is currently being computed, will thus show to what extent party narratives influenced the themes about which MPs tweeted.Second, the paper examines how MPs polarize the debate by framing certain topics along a partisan narrative by using ideologically loaded terminology to convey key ideas (e.g., Milizia 2010). This was tested for a flooding caused by heavy rainfall that devastated a region on July 14-15. The results of a Keyness analysis of tweets mentioning this event show that green MPs framed the event as a compelling argument for climate action, while populist MPs framed it as a case of instrumentalizing the plight of the people affected. I expect that STM, and Keyness analyses for other salient topics will further corroborate the working hypothesis.