The Bundeswehr in German Newspaper Coverage – Using Text Mining for Analysing Strategic Culture

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War, the international tasks of the Bundeswehr have become central issues of intense domestic debates in Germany. Thereby, the question of out-of-area missions has been a controversial issue for a long time. Against this backdrop, the article analyses the media coverage of the German Bundeswehr. Based on the strategic culture approach, we try to identify changes in the semantic fields connected to the Bundeswehr in articles from four leading German newspapers in the period 1990–2011. To handle the large amount of articles we use text mining methods summed up under the label of distant reading. Since these methods are not yet commonly used in political science research, testing selected distant reading approaches is an additional aim of this article.