Political Discourse Approach Applied the Current Study Issue Occurred

The research was to aim at approaching a political discourse as an effort to solve the issues. News reporting assigns meaning to issues by providing a continuous record of public events and visibility to the claims of actors. The public sphere is an important field where social problems are constructed and political alternatives become defined. When one considers these functions, it is hardly surprising that news has become an important source of data for a group of researchers who are interested in studying the nature of political challenges that are mobilized in the public domain. However, there sometimes appears to be a tendency within the social movements field to let theoretical development outrun a discussion on the methods with which we are equipped to address our research questions. In this contribution, our focus will be self-consciously directed to methods, and more precisely we make specific proposals regarding how the important methodological developments that have been made in the field in recent times, might be profitably extended.&nbsp

Redundancy in parliamentary political discourse

This paper is aimed at analysing the use of redundancy in Oral Questions in the Andalusian Parliament. The corpus is made up of 12 oral questions raised by the two main political parties at the Committee for Equality and Social Welfare. Six questions were raised by men and six by women. The study focuses on the identification of the most relevant functions of redundancy, as well as on the analysis of gender differences and differences between the two main political parties. Some of the devices studied in this paper are: anaphora, epistrophe, anadiplosis, epanalepsis, amplification, scesis onomaton, polysyndeton, hyperonymy, holonymy, synonymy, oppositenes

Discourse network analysis: policy debates as dynamic networks

Political discourse is the verbal interaction between political actors. Political actors make normative claims about policies conditional on each other. This renders discourse a dynamic network phenomenon. Accordingly, the structure and dynamics of policy debates can be analyzed with a combination of content analysis and dynamic network analysis. After annotating statements of actors in text sources, networks can be created from these structured data, such as congruence or conflict networks at the actor or concept level, affiliation networks of actors and concept stances, and longitudinal versions of these networks. The resulting network data reveal important properties of a debate, such as the structure of advocacy coalitions or discourse coalitions, polarization and consensus formation, and underlying endogenous processes like popularity, reciprocity, or social balance. The added value of discourse network analysis over survey-based policy network research is that policy processes can be analyzed from a longitudinal perspective. Inferential techniques for understanding the micro-level processes governing political discourse are being developed

A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS APPROACH TO EXPLAIN THE PATH DEPENDENCY OF SEASONAL FARM LABOUR REGULATIONS IN GERMANY

This article introduces discourse analysis as a theoretical concept and an empirical methodology that may enable the endogenization of path creation and path breaking changes in conventional models of political path dependencies. Economic criteria such as rents created by a policy do not always provide a comprehensive explanation for path dependent political decisions. Discourse theory implies that specific interpretative schemata and narratives, such as storylines in the mass media, heavily influence the political discourse. Discourses themselves exercise a constitutive power that constrains decision-making processes and, thus, influence the ensuing policy creation path. Hence, discourses must be taken into account when political path creation is analysed. In this paper we trace over time individual storylines that represent important elements of the discourse underlying the restriction of seasonal farm workers from central and eastern European countries in Germany. We illustrate how dominant speakers and their storylines have been and currently are interacting to shape this policy.Agricultural Policy, Path Dependencies, Discourse Analysis, Seasonal Farm Labour, Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

Mediating the Scottish independence debate

In the six months leading up to the referendum vote on 18 September 2014 Scotland experienced a period of exceptionally heightened political discourse, a widespread form of political participation unusual in western liberal-democracies. For almost two years fundamental questions about nation, state and society that are routinely taken for granted were exposed to widespread public discussion and debate involving millions of individuals normally silenced by the political fetish. Instead, these became the subject of open, often heated, discussion and debate by wide layers of society. This process of self-representation meant that political discourse was forced to shift from the logic of political self-marketing as the neutral, technical preserve of small circles of networked state managers and media interlocutors, what Pierre Bourdieu (1991) referred to as ‘political fetishism’. This widened public discourse began to break the stranglehold of the political fetish in Scotland, most obviously in the political vertigo experienced by the representatives of the Unionist parties and what might be called ‘media Unionism’. A mass grassroots movement in support of Independence benefited from a changed and, in some ways, reinvigorated media field. Where television once threatened the authority of newspapers, social media now challenges the dominance of television and the press

Speaking Crisis in the Eurozone Debt Crisis: Exploring the Potential and Limits of Transformational Agonistic Conflict

Agonism as a political theory emphasizes the ontological aspect of conflict in human political interaction. This article aims to shed light on the political practice of agonism – and in doing so on its limits – by viewing 'crisis discourse' as an agonistic political practice. As my analysis of the Dutch Socialist Party and the Freedom Party’s speech in the European Sovereign Debt Crisis shows, crisis discourse aimed to (re)create a ‘people’ and to justify radical change in economic and social structures. Crisis discourse is employed to construct an 'other' that can be based on ethnic and nationalist terms and to justify retroactive application of the law and the stripping of Dutch citizens of their rights. This attention to crisis discourse as an agonistic political practice highlights an unease within agonism itself: where must the agonist accepts limits to the conflict and contestation she so values? The article starts with Chantal Mouffe's answer to this question - her insistence that legitimate conflict must always recognize the shared values of equality and liberty - and proceeds to show that Mouffe's view unnecessarily relies on a deliberative democratic desire for consensus. Other than Mouffe, I draw on Honig’s emphasis of perpetual contestation to propose that the issue of limits can be best answered by reference to the core of agonistic thought: the preservation of the struggle over political norms and processes. It is not shared values or even a shared political space that matters, but that the political space of the ‘people’ – however contested membership therein might be – remains a place that the 'other' can re-ente

Political Footprints: Political Discourse Analysis using Pre-Trained Word Vectors

How political opinions are spread on social media has been the subject of many academic researches recently, and rightly so. Social platforms give researchers a unique opportunity to understand how public discourses are perceived, owned and instrumentalized by the general public. This paper is instead focussing on the political discourses themselves, and how a specific machine learning technique - vector space models (VSMs) -, can be used to make systematic and more objective discourse analysis. Political footprints are vector-based representation of a political discourse in which each vector represents a word, they are produced thanks to the training of the English lexicon on large corpora of text. This paper describes a simple implementation of political footprints, some heuristics on how to use them, and their application to four cases: the U.N. Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement, the 2008 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections. The reader will be given some reasons to believe that political footprints produce meaningful results, suggestions on how to improve them and validate the results

Polarization of coalitions in an agent-based model of political discourse

Political discourse is the verbal interaction between political actors in a policy domain. This article explains the formation of polarized advocacy or discourse coalitions in this complex phenomenon by presenting a dynamic, stochastic, and discrete agent-based model based on graph theory and local optimization. In a series of thought experiments, actors compute their utility of contributing a specific statement to the discourse by following ideological criteria, preferential attachment, agenda-setting strategies, governmental coherence, or other mechanisms. The evolving macro-level discourse is represented as a dynamic network and evaluated against arguments from the literature on the policy process. A simple combination of four theoretical mechanisms is already able to produce artificial policy debates with theoretically plausible properties. Any sufficiently realistic configuration must entail innovative and path-dependent elements as well as a blend of exogenous preferences and endogenous opinion formation mechanisms