Leaders matter in international politics. One of the main tools for assessing at-a-distance psychological characteristics of political leaders is Leadership Trait Analysis. To facilitate empirical studies, a Leadership Trait Analysis coding scheme for automated text analysis was developed to replace hand-coding. However, the coding scheme has been available only for English-language texts. To broaden research opportunities, this article presents a novel Leadership Trait Analysis coding scheme for the German language. This coding scheme allows engaging in empirical analysis based on original German language sources, thereby shedding new or different light on German foreign policy. At the same time, it contributes to moving automated content analysis beyond the English language more generally.

In 2013 Edward Snowden's disclosures of mass surveillance performed by US intelligence agencies seriously irritated politicians and citizens around the globe. This holds particularly true for privacy-sensitive communities in Germany. However, while the public was outraged, intelligence and security cooperation between the United States and Germany has been marked by continuity instead of disruption. The rather insubstantial debate over a so-called "No-Spy-Agreement" between the United States and Germany is just one telling example of the disconnect between public discourse and governmental action, as is the recent intelligence service regulation. This article considers why and where the "Snowden effect" has been lost on different discursive levels. We analyze and compare parliamentary and governmental discourses in the two years after the Snowden revelations by using the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) to dissect the groupspecific statements and interpretive schemes in 287 official documents by the German Bundestag, selected ministries and agencies within the policy subsystem. These will be analyzed in reference to actual governmental practice.

Over the last twenty years since the introduction of automated coding schemes, research in foreign policy analysis (FPA) has made great advances. However, this automatization process is based on the analysis of verbal statements of leaders to create leadership profiles and has remained largely confined in terms of language. That is, the coding schemes can only parse English-language texts. This reduces both the quality and quantity of available data and limits the application of these leadership profiling techniques beyond the Anglosphere. Against this background, this forum offers five reports on the development of freely available coding schemes for either operational code analysis or leadership trait analysis for languages other than English (i.e., Turkish, Arabic, Spanish, German, and Persian).

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