Party Politicisation and the Formative Phase of Environmental Policy-Making in Multi-level Systems: Electoral Discourse in UK Meso-elections 1998–2011

Despite sustained public demand for parties to act, the environment has been subject to limited issue salience in UK state-wide elections. This article uses qualitative and quantitative methods to explore party politicisation of the environment in regional elections 1998–2011. Contrary to earlier suggestions, the present findings indicate that multi-level systems may facilitate increasing environmental issue salience at the meso level. In part this is a function of nationalist parties' prioritisation of the environment. Overall, electoral discourse is shown to have a key formative role in driving policy divergence owing to inter-polity and inter/intra-party contrasts in salience and framing. From a normative perspective this suggests that the pluralising effect of (quasi-)federalism has the potential to foster greater responsiveness in party programmes through enhanced choice for the environmental issue public. This is an outcome of the expansion of electoral politics following state decentralisation and associated party competition to advance distinctive proposals over rivals

Using automated semantic tagging in Critical Discourse Analysis:a case study on Scottish independence from a Scottish nationalist perspective

To date, studies of social attitudes towards Scottish independence tend to have been of the structured survey or interview variety. This study seeks to support and build upon the findings of recent social attitude surveys on Scottish independence using what is, as far as the author is aware, a novel methodology. This involves combining the corpus linguistic technique of automated semantic tagging with a discourse-historical Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework.Applying this to a three-million-word corpus built from a pro-independence internet discussion forum, the analysis shows, firstly, a view that independence will strengthen, consolidate or transform Scottish identity in a positive way and, secondly, a distinct lack of strategies that seek to dismantle British identity or refer to historical disputes. Thus, an evaluation of this methodology suggests that it successfully manages to produce findings that support previous research, challenge existing stereotypes, and allow new insight into Scottish nationalist ideology