Uncovering the Secret Life of We-Pronouns in the German Parliament

Abstract

In social and political psychology, pronoun use, especially “we”, plays an important role reflecting social identity and predicting leadership success in the political realm and beyond. Previous research focused on top-level political leaders and word-counting methods. We examined We-language and reelection success based on 349,783 speeches from 3,630 members of the German federal parliament from 1949 to 2021. We combined traditional We-counts with new Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to explore syntactic and semantic contexts. We-language predicted next-term reelections and total number of reelections from the frontbench to the backbench and across many social and political factors. There were differential effects for We-language versus Our-language, We-specification, and We-categories. Our study revealed an upward trend of We-language in the parliament in recent decades. This research illustrates the use of new large-scale speech datasets and NLP-based tools for language and leadership research. We give valuable insights into the subtle language behind successful leadership.