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Analysing Calls to Order in German Parliamentary Debates

Paper · 2026 · Nina Smirnova, Daniel Dan and Philipp Mayr

Summary

This paper studies incivility in the German Bundestag through calls to order (CtOs), the formal sanctions a session president issues when members break parliamentary rules. Parliamentary research has rarely examined CtOs. The authors use the annotated XML version of the GermaParl corpus, which covers 19 legislative periods from 1949 to 2021. They detect CtOs with two keyword-based matching rules that also handle negation. A NER model and rule-based linking to a database of all Bundestag members identify who was sanctioned. A topic classifier assigns each speech to one of 21 parliamentary topics. The authors also built the first schema of CtO triggers and annotated every case manually. Statistical tests of these annotations show that personal insults are the main cause of CtOs. Men and opposition members are sanctioned more often than women and coalition members. Sanctions also depend partly on the individual presiding and on parliamentary dynamics, so applying the rules involves some subjectivity. The released dataset supports computational research on polarization and norm violations beyond standard sentiment analysis.

Key points

  • Corpus scale: GermaParl contains 958,098 speech contributions. Of these, 399,807 are presidency actions and 558 contain a CtO. Sanctioned individuals were disambiguated in 88% of these speeches (493).
  • Trigger schema: The five classes are ITO (insult towards individual), GI (general insult), NV (non-verbal), NDV (not documented verbal) and MISC.
  • Trigger frequencies: ITO dominates with 344 cases (median 17 per legislative period). It is followed by MISC (120), GI (106), NDV (48) and NV (13).
  • Who gets sanctioned: Opposition members received 460 CtOs, compared with 123 for coalition members. Across the Bundestag's history, 5.25% of male and 2.62% of female members were called to order.
  • Methods and data: Associations were tested with a Monte Carlo χ² test and Cramér's V. Most triggers occurred in speeches on governmental affairs and in presidency actions. The data is available at github.com/kalawinka/cto_analysis, and the speeches can be accessed via PoliCorp.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🔬GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social SciencesMannheim · Germany10 works · 5 citations

Also on the byline: MODUL University Vienna.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArtificial Intelligence · 17,965 worksArts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksSocial Sciences · 1,954 worksGeneral Social Sciences · 254 works

Cite

Cite as Nina Smirnova, Daniel Dan and Philipp Mayr. 2026. Analysing Calls to Order in German Parliamentary Debates. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences (PoliticalNLP 2026).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/3dbzaoowt4f2

@inproceedings{smirnova2026analysing,
  title = {{Analysing Calls to Order in German Parliamentary Debates}},
  author = {Nina Smirnova, Daniel Dan and Philipp Mayr},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences (PoliticalNLP 2026)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/3dbzaoowt4f2},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3dbzaoowt4f2}
}

References

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