Ideological Talk, Strategic Vote: German Parties’ Positions on the Military Intervention in Afghanistan in Parliament

Existing literature has examined party positions on several military interventions across various countries, mostly using manifestos and expert surveys as sources of data. This article employs a different approach by analysing German parties’ positions on one mission only: the Afghanistan intervention (2001–2021). We extract positions from parliamentary speeches through the automated text scaling method Wordfish and compare them with voting data to check public speech against behaviour. We find that moderate parties were more in favour of the intervention than extreme parties. We also highlight the presence of a strong government/opposition conflict. This dynamic was amplified in the votes as both government and opposition parties have more incentives to act strategically, while surprisingly, we find little evidence of differences in positioning across missions. Other than being the first comprehensive assessment of parties’ positions on the intervention in Afghanistan in any country, this article offers a methodological contribution to the study of the party politics of peace and security operations.