Patterns in the Press Releases of Trade Unions: How toUse Structural Topic Models in the Field of Industrial Relations

Journal article, 2022

Quantitative text analysis and the use of large data sets have received only limited attention in the field of Industrial Relations. This is unfortunate, given the variety of opportunities and possibilities these methods can address. We demonstrate the use of one promising technique of quantitative text analysis – the Structural Topic Model (STM) – to test the Insider-Outsider theory. This technique allowed us to find underlying topics in atext corpus of nearly 2,000 German trade union press releases (from 2000 to 2014). We provide astep-by-step overview of how to use STMsince we see this method as useful to the future of research in the field of Industrial Relations. Until now the methodological publications regarding STM mostly focus on the mathematics of the method and provide only aminimal discussion of their implementation. Instead, we provide apractical application of STM and apply this method to one of the most prominenttheories in the field of Industrial Relations. Contrary to the original Insider-Outsider arguments, but in line with thecurrent state of research, we show that unions do in fact use topics within their press releases which are relevant for both Insider and Outsider groups.