Jens Wäckerle

University of Cologne | UOC · Cologne Center for Comparative Politics

As the share of women in parliaments rises, increased attention is paid to how they substantively represent women. Meanwhile, the availability of parliamentary speech data has enabled researchers to dissect politicians’ rhetorical patterns. We combine these two literatures to ask whether rhetorical differences between men and women in parliament ar...

The role of domestic public opinion is an important topic in research on international negotiations, yet we know little about how exactly it manifests itself. We focus on government rhetoric during negotiations and develop a conceptual distinction between implicit and explicit manifestations of public opinion. Drawing on a database of video recordi...

While parties have a large role in influencing the representation of women, much less is known of how voters perceive parties’ efforts to promote female candidates. Existing evidence from the literature suggests that, on an aggregate level, voters value female candidates at least to the same extent as male candidates. Meanwhile, evidence points bot...

Western powers have discussed and implemented several policies in response to the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. One such possible answer was an immediate embargo on all Russian energy exports to the EU. While seen as a strong measure against Russia's war effort, some EU governments were unenthusiastic, due to potential ne...

What can policy makers do in day‐to‐day decision making to strengthen citizens' belief that the political system is legitimate? Much literature has highlighted that the realization of citizens' personal preferences in policy making is an important driver of legitimacy beliefs. We argue that citizens, in addition, also care about whether a policy re...

In recent years, parties in the United Kingdom have increasingly pushed for higher descriptive representation of women. To achieve this goal, Labour has introduced All-Women Shortlists, while the Conservatives have used the A-List and similar tools to promote women in their party. This article shows how All-Women Shortlists were effective at levell...

This study investigates gender bias in political interactions on digital platforms by considering how politicians present themselves on Twitter and how they are approached by others. Incorporating social identity theory, we use dictionary analyses to detect biases in individual tweets connected to the German federal elections in 2017. Besides senti...

The analysis of political texts from parliamentary speeches, party manifestos, social media, or press releases forms the basis of major and growing fields in political science, not least since advances in “text-as-data” methods have rendered the analysis of large text corpora straightforward. However, a lot of sources of political speech are not re...

Comparative scholars of legislative politics continue to face the challenge of measuring a key theoretical concept: conflict at the level of legislative bills. We address this challenge with a multilingual sentiment‐based approach and show that such a measure can effectively capture different types of parliamentary conflict. We also demonstrate tha...