[2509.07274] LLM Analysis of 150+ years of German Parliamentary Debates on Migration Reveals Shift from Post-War Solidarity to Anti-Solidarity in the Last Decade

Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2509.07274 (cs) [Submitted on 8 Sep 2025 (v1), last revised 2 Apr 2026 (this version, v2)] Title:LLM Analysis of 150+ years of German Parliamentary Debates on Migration Reveals Shift from Post-War Solidarity to Anti-Solidarity in the Last Decade Authors:Aida Kostikova, Ole Pütz, Steffen Eger, Olga Sabelfeld, Benjamin Paassen View a PDF of the paper titled LLM Analysis of 150+ years of German Parliamentary Debates on Migration Reveals Shift from Post-War Solidarity to Anti-Solidarity in the Last Decade, by Aida Kostikova and 4 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Migration has been a core topic in German political debate, from the postwar displacement of millions of expellees to labor migration and recent refugee movements. Studying political speech across such wide-ranging phenomena in depth has traditionally required extensive manual annotation, limiting analysis to small subsets of the data. Large language models (LLMs) offer a potential way to overcome this constraint. Using a theory-driven annotation scheme, we examine how well LLMs annotate subtypes of solidarity and anti-solidarity in German parliamentary debates and whether the resulting labels support valid downstream inference. We first provide a comprehensive evaluation of multiple LLMs, analyzing the effects of model size, prompting strategies, fine-tuning, historical versus contemporary data, and systematic error patterns. We find that the stronge...