Speaking of politics in parliament : experiences of writing a book on the digitized Bundestag debates, 1949–2017

Abstract

This article consists of ex post methodological reflections on the procedures and practices that I applied in my monograph Politik als parlamentarischer Begriff: Perspektiven aus den Plenardebatten des Deutschen Bundestags (Leverkusen, 2021). The book analyses through 18 parliamentary terms the conceptualization of politics in German Bundestag plenary debates from 1949 to 2017. The book was an illustration of my long-term aim of combining political theorizing with the empirical analysis of debate. In writing the book, my guiding idea was to apply Ludwig Wittgenstein’s point, that the meaning of a concept lies in its use, to an analysis of how parliamentary debates open a perspective on the conceptualization of politics closer to ‘political life itself’, to quote Quentin Skinner. Conversely, I also wanted to discuss how a focus on politics as a concept helps us to improve our understanding of the parliamentary style of politics, in which parliamentary voting forms the last step of a debate. To this purpose, the book assumes that every item on a parliamentary agenda has a political aspect to be debated. The book makes use of two interpretative approaches: the rhetoric of topoi and a typology of politics as an activity.