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

2026-08-05

AI Summary

This study investigates the evolution of evidence-based versus intuition-based rhetoric among mainstream political elites in Germany following the parliamentary entry of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, and its potential implications for democratic deliberation. Drawing on a corpus of 4.5 million tweets and 59,170 parliamentary speeches from 2015 to 2025, this work presents the first systematic analysis in a multiparty European democracy demonstrating a marked discursive shift toward intuition-based appeals after AfD’s 2017 parliamentary entry, particularly pronounced among right-wing parties. The study introduces an innovative “Evidence Minus Intuition” (EMI) metric and employs empirically validated distributed lexical representation methods to semantically quantify large-scale textual data, revealing a significant decline in parliamentary EMI scores and a gradual convergence toward lower EMI levels on Twitter.

Abstract

The spread of misinformation is widely perceived as a threat to democratic deliberation, yet how political elites' rhetorical commitments to truth shift alongside the rise of populist actors remains poorly understood. Analysing 4.5 million tweets and 59,170 parliamentary speeches by German political elites between 2015 and 2025, we measure evidence-based and intuition-based rhetoric using a validated distributed dictionary representation. Across both arenas, intuition-based language has become more prominent, and right-leaning actors consistently exhibit the lowest Evidence Minus Intuition (EMI) scores. The parliamentary entry of the extreme-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in 2017 coincides with sharp downward shifts in EMI across the broader chamber, while a more gradual decline is observed on Twitter. These findings document an association between far-right visibility and a changing approach to truth in elite discourse in a multiparty European democracy.

Problem

• misinformation
• populist actors
• evidence-based rhetoric
• intuition-based rhetoric
• far-right

Innovation

• distributed dictionary representation
• evidence-based rhetoric
• intuition-based rhetoric
• far-right populism
• elite discourse