13.10.2026 - 26.01.2027: Poli­tical Speaker Series

15/12/2026

The Supply-Side of Political Realignment in the Knowledge Economy: The Politicization of Occupational Groups

Hauke Licht

Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Innsbruck

The political dynamics of 21st century advanced capitalist democracies are fundamentally different from those of earlier times. While in the past, “Fordist” economies were largely structured by the traditional “Lipset-Rokkan” cleavages, today’s post-industrial economies are structured by new conflict lines in a realigned political space. Political sociologists, political economists, and political behavior scholars have analyzed these transformations extensively on the micro-level of citizens’ political preferences, attitudes, identities, and behavior. We know, for example, that new occupational class schemes of the knowledge economy (such as Daniel Oesch’s class scheme) are able to capture today’s micro-level dynamics well. While this demand side of political realignment has thus carefully been studied, we know much less about the supply side of political realignment. More specifically, we lack systematic insights into the questions whether and how political parties talk to and talk about different occupational classes. Moreover, we do not know whether such references ti occupational groups differ systematically across countries, time, and party families. This paper sheds systematic descriptive light on these questions. We develop theoretical expectations on parties’ use of occupational group mentions and test these with state-of-the-art text analysis tools. This data allows exploring the politicization of occupational groups in any type of political text.

26/01/2027

Gender and Morality in Plenary Speeches

Corinna Kröber

Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Greifswald.

How does gender shape the use of moral rhetoric in parliamentary debates? Drawing on Moral Foundations Theory, this talk argues that gendered socialization leads women to emphasize Care/Harm and Fairness/Cheating, while men are more likely to invoke Loyalty/Betrayal and Authority/Subversion. Beyond these baseline differences, moral claim-making is also strategic: women adapt their use of moral arguments in response to electoral incentives and policy contexts, as reputational pressures intensifies. Analyses of plenary speeches from 9 European Union (EU) member states between 2015 and 2022 using the ParlaMint 5 English translated corpus allow testing these propositions. The analyses rely on a dictionary-based approach to identify references to moral foundations. The findings indicate that women MPs are more likely than men to reference the Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, and Loyalty/Betrayal moral foundation in plenary speeches, while no clear gender difference emerges for Authority/Subversion. Importantly, these gender differences are context-dependent. When elections approach, women seem to refrain from gender-incongruent forms of moral communication, possibly to avoid electoral costs. Overall, this research demonstrates that moral rhetoric in politics reflects not only gendered norms, but also strategic adaptation to the political context.