💬 NLP

German parties shifted towards intuition-based rhetoric after the far right's parliamentary breakthrough

This study analyzes millions of German political communications from 2015 to 2025 to demonstrate that the parliamentary breakthrough of the far-right AfD in 2017 coincided with a significant shift toward intuition-based rhetoric and a decline in evidence-based discourse across the broader political elite.

Original authors: Peer Saleth, Segun T. Aroyehun, Fabio Carrella, Christoph M. Abels, Stephan Lewandowsky, David Garcia

Published 2026-08-06

📖 5 min read🧠 Deep dive

CC BY 4.0

Original authors: Peer Saleth, Segun T. Aroyehun, Fabio Carrella, Christoph M. Abels, Stephan Lewandowsky, David Garcia

Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ✨ This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer

Imagine the political world as a giant, noisy town square where everyone is trying to convince the crowd that they are telling the truth. In this square, there are two main ways people try to win arguments. The first way is like a scientist in a lab coat: they bring out charts, data, and hard facts, saying, "Look at the numbers; this is what actually happened." The second way is more like a storyteller by a campfire: they rely on gut feelings, personal stories, and strong emotions, saying, "I just feel deep down that this is right." For a democracy to work well, people usually need to agree on the basic facts before they can debate their feelings. But recently, scientists have noticed that the "scientist" style of talking is fading away in many places, replaced by the "storyteller" style. This paper dives into the heart of this shift, asking a big question: Did the arrival of a new, extreme political group in Germany change how everyone talks, making them rely more on feelings and less on facts?

The researchers, a team of digital detectives from universities in Germany, the UK, and Brazil, decided to investigate this by looking at the digital and physical "town squares" of Germany. They didn't just guess; they analyzed a massive mountain of text: 4.5 million tweets from politicians and nearly 60,000 speeches from the German parliament (the Bundestag) between 2015 and 2025. To make sense of this, they used a special computer tool called a "Distributed Dictionary Representation." Think of this tool as a super-smart translator that doesn't just count words like "fact" or "feeling," but understands the vibe of the whole sentence. It gives every speech or tweet a score called the "Evidence Minus Intuition" (EMI) score. A high score means the speaker is leaning heavily on data and proof; a low (or negative) score means they are leaning heavily on gut feelings and personal conviction.

The team was looking for a specific moment in time: when the far-right party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), entered the parliament in 2017. Before this, the German parliament had been free of such extreme right-wing groups since the days of the Nazis. The researchers wanted to see if the arrival of this new player acted like a shockwave, changing the way all the other politicians spoke.

What they found was a clear and striking pattern. Across the board, from the chaotic, fast-paced world of Twitter to the formal, rule-bound halls of the parliament, politicians started using more intuition-based language and less evidence-based language over the decade. The far-right actors, particularly the AfD, consistently had the lowest EMI scores, meaning they relied the most on feelings and the least on hard data. But here is the twist: the other parties didn't stay the same. As the far-right became more visible, the mainstream parties began to shift their style to match them.

On Twitter, this change happened slowly, like a gradual drift. The centrist and left-leaning politicians slowly started using more "feeling" words and fewer "fact" words, narrowing the gap between them and the far-right. However, in the parliament, the change was much more dramatic and sudden. Every time there was a federal election, the entire chamber seemed to take a giant step down in its use of evidence. The biggest drop happened right after the 2017 election when the AfD first entered the parliament. It was as if the whole room suddenly decided to stop bringing their calculators and start bringing their gut feelings.

The researchers were careful to rule out some other possible reasons for this change. They checked if the politicians were just talking about different topics (like switching from talking about taxes to talking about war), which might naturally require different kinds of language. They used advanced computer models to control for the topics being discussed, and the shift remained. This suggests the change wasn't just about what they were talking about, but how they were talking about it. The style itself had changed.

The study also looked at the historical record of German speeches going back to 1867. They found a similar, sharp drop in evidence-based language during the 1930s and 1940s, a time when the country was under a regime that famously rejected facts in favor of "inner truths" and emotional conviction. This historical parallel serves as a stark warning: when a political culture shifts away from evidence and toward pure intuition, it can be a sign of deep trouble for democracy.

In short, the paper suggests that the rise of the far-right in Germany didn't just add a new voice to the conversation; it changed the volume and tone of the entire conversation. The arrival of a group that relies heavily on intuition and emotion seems to have pulled the rest of the political spectrum in the same direction, making the whole debate less about facts and more about feelings. While the researchers note that they cannot prove this with absolute certainty that one caused the other, the timing and the pattern are so strong that it points to a "contagion" effect. The evidence-based approach to truth, which is essential for checking facts and holding leaders accountable, is eroding in Germany, and it is happening faster there than it did in the United States, where a similar shift took decades. The study leaves us with a worrying thought: democracies can handle people disagreeing about the facts, but they might not be able to survive if people stop agreeing that facts matter at all.

Technical Summary: German Parties Shifted Towards Intuition-Based Rhetoric After the Far Right's Parliamentary Breakthrough

Problem Statement
Democratic deliberation relies on a shared consensus regarding truth, yet the spread of misinformation and the rise of populist actors threaten this foundation. While previous literature has documented a long-term decline in evidence-based language in the U.S. Congress and shifts in elite source sharing, it remains unclear whether comparable epistemic shifts occur in multiparty European democracies. Specifically, the relationship between the parliamentary entry of far-right actors and the rhetorical commitments of political elites regarding truth (evidence-based vs. intuition-based reasoning) has not been systematically examined. This study investigates whether the visibility of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) correlates with a shift in the epistemic style of German political discourse between 2015 and 2025.

Methodology
The authors analyzed two complementary arenas of elite communication: 4.5 million tweets from over 2,000 German politicians (2015–2025) and 59,170 plenary speeches from the 18th–21st German Bundestag (2015–2025).

Measurement: The study employs a validated Distributed Dictionary Representation (DDR) to compute an Evidence-Minus-Intuition (EMI) score. This metric quantifies the relative prevalence of evidence-grounded rhetoric (facts, data, external reality) versus intuition-grounded rhetoric (feelings, instincts, personal conviction) in political text.
NLP Pipeline:
- Embeddings: A gensim word2vec model was pre-trained on a historical German parliamentary corpus (1867–2021) and fine-tuned separately for the Twitter and contemporary Bundestag corpora to capture platform-specific semantics.
- Dictionary Validation: English intuition and evidence dictionaries were translated into German and validated via a pre-registered survey (N=47) using Likert scales to ensure semantic alignment. The final dictionaries contained 48 evidence terms and 38 intuition terms.
- Scoring: For each text, the cosine similarity between the text's averaged word embedding and the averaged dictionary embeddings was calculated. These similarities were z-standardized, and the EMI score was derived as the difference: $EMI = z(D_{evidence}) - z(D_{intuition})$ .
Validation: The DDR pipeline was validated through:
1. Cross-model correlation: Comparing results with generic fastText embeddings ( $r=0.93$ ).
2. Bootstrapping: Resampling dictionary compositions (1,000 iterations) to ensure stability.
3. Human Annotation: A survey (N=284) where human raters annotated 1,300 parliamentary passages. The computed EMI scores showed an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.72 against human labels.
Statistical Analysis: Linear mixed-effects models were used to test temporal trends and structural breakpoints. The models included random intercepts for actors and controlled for temporal autocorrelation (lagged EMI). Piecewise structural breakpoints were introduced at federal election dates (2017, 2021, 2025) to test for level shifts coinciding with the AfD's entry and subsequent elections. Topic modeling (BERTopic) was used to control for agenda-setting effects, ensuring shifts were stylistic rather than merely topical.

Key Results

Overall Trend: Across both Twitter and the Bundestag, there was a significant shift toward intuition-based language between 2015 and 2025. The mean EMI score declined from positive (evidence-leaning) to negative (intuition-leaning).
- Twitter: Mean EMI dropped from 0.027 to -0.035.
- Parliament: A sharper decline occurred, from 0.205 to -0.147.
Partisan Patterns: Right-leaning actors, particularly the AfD, consistently exhibited the lowest EMI scores (highest reliance on intuition).
- In the Bundestag, the AfD had a mean EMI of -0.473, while the SPD (highest among major parties) was 0.113.
- On Twitter, the AfD scored -0.268, compared to 0.135 for the Greens.
Temporal Dynamics and Breakpoints:
- Twitter: The decline was gradual and approximately linear across the observation period.
- Parliament: The decline was characterized by discrete level shifts aligned with electoral cycles. The most pronounced downward shift coincided with the 2017 federal election, the moment the AfD entered the Bundestag.
- Convergence: Over time, centrist and left-leaning camps shifted toward the lower EMI levels of the right-leaning camp. In the Bundestag, this manifested as a "chamber-wide" shift in 2017, where all camps moved downward simultaneously, preserving the relative ordering but lowering the overall epistemic standard.
Robustness: The observed shifts remained significant even after controlling for document-level topic fixed effects, indicating that the change was in the style of reasoning (epistemic orientation) rather than just a change in topics discussed.

Significance and Claims
The paper documents an association between the visibility of far-right actors and a changing approach to truth in elite discourse within a multiparty European democracy. The authors claim this is the first cross-arena, multiparty European evidence of such a shift.

Extension of Contagion Theory: While prior literature established that mainstream parties adopt the policy positions and issue priorities of radical right parties ("contagion"), this study suggests contagion extends to a third, conceptually orthogonal dimension: the epistemic style of discourse.
Mechanisms: The authors propose that the shift may result from strategic rhetorical mimicry (adopting populist styles to compete), issue-level agenda-setting (discussing topics amenable to intuition-based framing), or platform amplification. The distinct patterns between the gradual Twitter decline and the discrete parliamentary jumps suggest different mechanisms (social diffusion vs. compositional adaptation).
Democratic Implications: The authors argue that while intuition carries moral and experiential value indispensable to public life, an over-reliance on intuition at the expense of evidence undermines the democratic functions of accountability, informed policy evaluation, and cross-partisan deliberation. The study highlights that democracies may be able to withstand disagreement over facts, but it is less clear they can withstand disagreement over whether facts themselves are a foundational requirement of deliberation.
Caveats: The authors modestly note that while the 2017 shift is temporally aligned with the AfD's entry, other shocks (e.g., the pandemic, geopolitical conflicts) occurred simultaneously. Therefore, the study reports co-movements consistent with a diffusion hypothesis rather than making definitive causal claims without further exogenous variation.

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