Agenda Setting on Digitalisation and its Socioeconomic Implications in Germany

Digitalisation is a megatrend, and how policymakers talk about digitalisation and its socioeconomic implications matters, as it reflects the way the digital transformation is shaped. My previous findings suggest that the German Bundestag and German media talk about different topics in the context of digitalisation, i.e. when they mention digitalisation. Further, how the German Bundestag talks about digitalisation and its socioeconomic implications has changed over the past few years and the covid-19 pandemic in particular. I am interested in who sets the agenda on digitalisation and its socioeconomic implications in Germany. I relate German parliamentary debates to media coverage, to analyse to what extent media reporting influences the agenda and framing on digitalisation supported by policymakers, and who dominates the agenda. For the German parliamentary debates, I rely on Rauh & Schwalbach’s (2020) ParlSpeech V2 dataset covering speeches until 2019, and scrape more recent parliamentary speeches. As for media coverage, I rely on samples of newspaper articles and transcripts of news broadcasting programmes in German public TV. I first use hierarchical topic models to compare how similar or different the contexts are, in which digitalisation is talked about in the media and in parliament. I then combine this comparative approach with a network analysis, where I model the flow of information between policymakers and the media, by identifying when political parties or individual politicians are mentioned in articles related to digitalisation. This approach helps us understand how close or distant policymakers are to one another in their agenda on digitalisation and its socioeconomic implications, and how certain topics and information spread over time.