Abstract

Coaching has been widely used in Germany for several years. It promises to increase personal success in various fields, especially in academic appointments. Working on the self in the form of coaching is supposed to increase personal opportunities.

This development can also be seen in the political sphere. It is now not only various party-affiliated organisations that offer coaching, but increasingly also political parties themselves in order to impart methodological and substantive skills.

But what ideas of a political subject underlie these coaching programmes? What criteria must the subject fulfil in order to be visible in the field of politics? And which "competences" should be imparted?

Qualitative methods will be used to investigate these questions. On the one hand, ethnographic observations of political coaching, discourse analyses of the materials used in coaching measures and expert interviews with political coaches, on the other hand expert interviews with politicians and the analysis of meetings of political committees would be of interest.