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This article reports on a Digital Humanities research project which is concerned with the automated linguistic and visual analysis of political discourses with a particular focus on the concept of deliberative communication. According to the theory of deliberative communication as discussed within political science, political debates should be inclusive and stakeholders participating in these debates are required to justify their positions rationally and respectfully and should eventually defer to the better argument. The focus of the article is on the novel interactive

We present the first web-based Visual Analytics framework for the analysis of multi-party discourse data using verbatim text transcripts. Our framework supports a broad range of server-based processing steps, ranging from data mining and statistical analysis to deep linguistic parsing of English and German. On the client-side, browser-based Visual Analytics components enable multiple perspectives on the analyzed data. These interactive visualizations allow exploratory content analysis, argumentation pattern review and speaker interaction modeling.

This article examines the conditions that influence citizens’ satisfaction with democracy in Africa. In the analysis, individual, ethnic group, and national context determinants are combined in a multilevel model allowing a comparative analysis over time, countries, ethnic groups, and individuals. Using Afrobarometer survey data along with ethnic group-level and national-level data, I show that factors shaping citizens’ satisfaction can be found on each contextual level. To a large extent, perceived economic and political inequalities between ethnic groups explain variations in citizens’ satisfaction.

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