Digitalisation and Inequality in Parliamentary Debates since COVID-19

• In Event: (Post-)Pandemic Politics

Abstract

The covid-19 pandemic has revealed and exacerbated different forms of inequality. One aspect of life in which citizens were affected to a very different degree was their jobs and job security. Work that could easily be done from home instead as from the office when lockdowns were imposed in many countries, tends to also be work that is paid better. As a consequence, people are now increasingly seeking out jobs with higher hourly wages and which can be done remotely. (World Economic Forum, 2021; Indeed, 2021) In many sectors in which jobs do not lend themselves to remote working, such as stocking and personal care, pay is generally lower. Many of these jobs are also more prone to be substituted at least partially through automation. (Kemmerling, Volkmann & Gast Zepeda, 2020) The covid-19 pandemic hence acted as a catalyst for digitalisation and automation in the work place. Up until the covid-19 pandemic, digitalisation was not discussed to a significant extent in relation to social and labour policies in the German Bundestag (Kemmerling & Gast Zepeda, Forthcoming), indicating that the parliament was not being responsive to the debate on the future of work taking place in academia and in the media. We aim to analyse whether the covid-19 pandemic has changed this and whether digitalisation and automation are now discussed more in the context of social and labour policies, as well as inequality. We are specifically interested to understand whether digitalisation and automation are perceived more as a chance or as a threat both for the future of work and for social and income inequality. We rely on Rauh & Schwalbach’s (2020) Parlspeech VS dataset for parliamentary debates up until December 2018, and scrape the parliamentary speeches for 2019-2022 from the web, to include more recent debates. Through Latent Dirichlet Allocation and cluster analysis, we model hierarchical topics to better understand in which relation digitalisation and automation are discussed to social and labour policies in the German Bundestag. We then use sentiment analysis to determine how positive or negative those statements are, and validate both approaches through manual inspection of random samples of speeches.

Authors

• Stephanie Gast Zepeda, University of Erfurt

• Achim Kemmerling, Erfurt University