The evolution of discourses on livestock farming in Germany: a text mining analysis of parliamentary debates (1949–2021)

Intensive livestock farming has significant environmental, health, and animal welfare impacts, driving increased societal pressure for legislative action, particularly in high-income countries. This study investigates the evolution of political discourses on livestock farming in Germany from the post-war period to 2021, using a corpus-assisted discourse analysis combining structural topic modeling and lexicometric analysis of parliamentary speeches. Sixteen topics were identified and grouped into four themes: structural change, animal welfare, environmental degradation, and consumer safety. Semantic analysis revealed changing concepts and priorities, from livestock farming as an exclusively economic activity, to criticism of declining family farming with growing attention to animal welfare. The combination of methods allowed to identify predominant discourses of animal welfare and structural change, while environmental risks and consumer safety were less prominent. The findings demonstrate the complexity of political debates surrounding livestock farming in Germany and the strength of combining topic modeling with lexicometric analysis to integrate thematic and linguistic dimensions. The analysis reveals that while the discourse on livestock farming has diversified to include environmental, welfare and consumer concerns, new topics were often adopted through recombination with established discourses. This corpus-assisted approach provides a transferable framework for analyzing political discourses across spatial and historical contexts.