Benjamin Rohr: Mapping Elite Conflict in Weimar Germany: The Structure of Parliamentary Interactions

Location: Seidenstraße 36, Raum: 2.067 (2. OG)

As part of the SOWI VII department colloquium, we are very pleased to welcome Benjamin Rohr (University of Mannheim) to join us.

Mapping Elite Conflict in Weimar Germany: The Structure of Parliamentary Interactions
Benjamin Rohr, University of Mannheim

In complex multiparty systems, professional parties continuously reposition themselves, thus reconfiguring the political field. Through parliamentary speech and interaction, parties signal their policy positions to the public and to other political actors, providing vital cues about future action. This paper examines the case of Weimar Germany, where, following World War I, a fragile multiparty democracy emerged. By analyzing interactions among political parties in the German Reichstag between 1920 and 1932, we investigate the evolving structure of elite conflict and cooperation during this critical period. We introduce a new database derived from digitized parliamentary proceedings, capturing all speeches, interjections, and reactions to interjections recorded by parliamentary stenographers. Each interaction is assigned a politeness score based on the type of interaction (e.g., applause, agreement, laughter, shouting) and modifying descriptors (e.g., “tumultuous” or “lively”). Using these scores, we first employ network analysis to trace changes in the structure of deference. We then construct a party-party structural equivalence matrix based on shared interaction patterns and arrange parties in a two-dimensional space using multidimensional scaling. We find that the resulting party structure closely aligns with one derived from roll-call vote similarity. By contrast, party positions derived from text-based similarity using word embeddings—including doc2vec, Word Mover’s Distance, and sentence-BERT—fail to reproduce this structure. By examining relationships formed through repeated interactions on the floor, this study provides novel insights into elite competition and polarization in the Weimar Republic, contributing to broader debates on institutional instability in democratic systems under stress.

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