From Text to Political Positions: Text Analysis across Disciplines PDF
Preview From Text to Political Positions: Text Analysis across Disciplines
From Text to Political Positions Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture (DAPSAC) The editors invite contributions that investigate political, social and cultural processes from a linguistic/discourse-analytic point of view. The aim is to publish monographs and edited volumes which combine language-based approaches with disciplines concerned essentially with human interaction – disciplines such as political science, international relations, social psychology, social anthropology, sociology, economics, and gender studies. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/dapsac General Editors Ruth Wodak, Andreas Musolff and Johann Unger Lancaster University / University of East Anglia / Lancaster University [email protected]; [email protected] and [email protected] Advisory Board Christine Anthonissen Konrad Ehlich Christina Schäffner Stellenbosch University Free University, Berlin Aston University Michael Billig J.R. Martin Louis de Saussure Loughborough University University of Sydney University of Neuchâtel Piotr Cap Jacob L. Mey Hailong Tian University of Łódź University of Southern Denmark Tianjin Foreign Studies University Paul Chilton Greg Myers Lancaster University Lancaster University Joanna Thornborrow Cardiff University Teun A. van Dijk John Richardson Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Loughborough University Sue Wright Barcelona University of Portsmouth Luisa Martín Rojo Universidad Autonoma de Madrid Volume 55 From Text to Political Positions. Text analysis across disciplines Edited by Bertie Kaal, Isa Maks and Annemarie van Elfrinkhof From Text to Political Positions Text analysis across disciplines Edited by Bertie Kaal Isa Maks Annemarie van Elfrinkhof VU University Amsterdam John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 8 the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data From Text to Political Positions : Text analysis across disciplines / Edited by Bertie Kaal, Isa Maks and Annemarie van Elfrinkhof. p. cm. (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, issn 1569-9463 ; v. 55) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Discourse analysis--Political aspects. 2. Public communication--Political aspects. 3. Mass media--Political aspects. 4. Communication in politics. I. Kaal, Bertie. P302.77.F76 2014 401’.41--dc23 2014004430 isbn 978 90 272 0646 6 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 7034 4 (Eb) © 2014 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa Table of contents Foreword vii chapter 1 Positions of parties and political cleavages between parties in texts 1 Jan Kleinnijenhuis and Wouter van Atteveldt Part I. Computational methods for political text analysis Introduction 23 Piek Vossen chapter 2 Comparing the position of Canadian political parties using French and English manifestos as textual data 27 Benoît Collette and François Pétry chapter 3 Leveraging textual sentiment analysis with social network modeling: Sentiment analysis of political blogs in the 2008 U.S. presidential election 47 Wojciech Gryc and Karo Moilanen chapter 4 Issue framing and language use in the Swedish blogosphere: Changing notions of the outsider concept 71 Stefan Dahlberg and Magnus Sahlgren chapter 5 Text to ideology or text to party status? 93 Graeme Hirst, Yaroslav Riabinin, Jory Graham, Magali Boizot-Roche, and Colin Morris chapter 6 Sentiment analysis in parliamentary proceedings 117 Steven Grijzenhout, Maarten Marx, and Valentin Jijkoun chapter 7 The qualitative analysis of political documents 135 Jared J. Wesley vi From Text to Political Positions Part II. From text to political positions via discourse analysis Introduction 163 Veronika Koller chapter 8 The potential of narrative strategies in the discursive construction of hegemonic positions and social change 171 Nicolina Montesano Montessori chapter 9 Christians, feminists, liberals, socialists, workers and employers: The emergence of an unusual discourse coalition 189 Anja Eleveld chapter 10 Between the Union and a United Ireland: Shifting positions in Northern Ireland’s post-Agreement political discourse 207 Laura Filardo-Llamas chapter 11 Systematic stylistic analysis: The use of a linguistic checklist 225 Maarten van Leeuwen chapter 12 Participation and recontextualisation in new media: Political discourse analysis and YouTube 245 Michael S. Boyd Part III. Converging methods Introduction 271 Alan Cienki chapter 13 From text to the construction of political party landscapes: A hybrid methodology developed for Voting Advice Applications 275 André Krouwel and Matthew Wall chapter 14 From text to political positions: The convergence of political, linguistic and discourse analysis 297 Annemarie van Elfrinkhof, Isa Maks, and Bertie Kaal About the authors 325 Index 331 Foreword There is clearly a need for the identification and positioning of political parties and their stances. This need is both of a societal and of an academic nature. Socially it seems that traditional voting patterns have dissolved and information sources have diversified exponentially. Voters no longer vote primarily according to their community identity, such as class or religion (Franklin et al. 1992), but they make their choice independently. Accessible information about party positions on the social structure in general as well as on specific issues is therefore imperative to inform the public so that they can cast an informed vote. Academically, identifying policy preferences and positions of political parties and their actors is primarily a concern for political scientists. When analysing the behaviour of political parties over time or across countries (political) scien- tists need reliable and valid measures to establish positions. The search for such estimates has resulted in a range of analytical methods ranging from expert sur- veys, to opinion polls and roll-call behaviour to various forms of content analysis (Krouwel and Van Elfrinkhof 2013). Each of these methods has its advantages and disadvantages, resulting in more or less reliable, valid and transparent measure- ments that might be improved by adopting cross-disciplinary research designs. This volume contributes to the literature of party positioning by focusing on political text analyses with a wide variety of approaches from political science, linguistics and discourse analysis. The central question is how to identify verbal expressions of politically motivated ideas in texts. Political texts in particular func- tion to articulate ideas persuasively to a broad audience. For this reason, political texts reflect the goals and policies induced by the norms and values of a party’s ideology and identity. As such, texts are an excellent source of political positions and their rationale. Furthermore, the sheer abundance and availability of political texts make them an attractive source for analysis, especially since collections of these texts are often available digitally. The chapters in this volume discuss meth- ods to analyse a variety of political text genres that are designed to establish and communicate party positions, including newspaper articles, election manifestos, campaign and parliamentary speeches, online documents, blogs and interviews (see Table 1). The purpose of this volume is to discover how stance is encoded in political texts and how such characteristics can best be gauged on political dimensions. viii From Text to Political Positions Simply reading and interpreting a text will not do, as meaning making and the social implications of policies are subject to their dynamic and diverse contexts, as analysed in qualitative studies. Another approach is to analyse large amounts of political text to find variations in content, linguistic and discursive aspects that can be linked to positions on political dimensions. Current types of analysis apply qualitative and quantitative methods, or combinations thereof. Such attempts at modelling political text analysis for party positioning reveal the complexity of sense making. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are pursued in many of the contributions in this volume. We have tried to divide the variety of approaches into meaningful parts that give an impression of the division between qualitative and quantitative methods, as well as attempts to converge them with reflections on the flaws and advan- tages of mixing methods. As an introduction to the problematics addressed, Kleinnijenhuis and Van Atteveldt (Chapter 1) describe the evolution of political text analysis from the early concept of political thought (Machiavelli) to modern advances in the domains of knowledge representation, natural language parsing, automated content analysis and semantic-web technologies. That chapter then focuses on conceptualisation through the logic and structure of semantic net- works and discusses the sophisticated NET-Method, developed at The Network Institute (VU University Amsterdam). Part I, introduced by Piek Vossen, is a collection of discussions about automated, quantitative methods to identify characteristics and variation in political texts. Part II, introduced by Veronika Koller, focuses on qualitative methods, some of which apply quantitative analysis as evidence of the existence of linguistic and discursive aspects of meaning mak- ing. Part III is introduced by Alan Cienki and includes two chapters on projects attempting to mix and match qualitative and quantitative methods for better results and best practice. The purpose of this book is to present the variety of con- siderations and applications of text analysis for political party positioning, and to inform scholars of the wide range of available methods that have their advantages and disadvantages under different conditions. More ambitiously, this book aims to trigger cross-disciplinary research in which methods are combined, as a way to refine research methods for the analysis of stance taking and to achieve more accurate results overall. However, attempts to converge quantitative and qualitative methods of con- tent analysis run across the three parts, as shown in Table 1. For instance, the chapters by Kleinnijenhuis and Van Atteveldt, Collette and Pétry, and Krouwel and Wall show the ability and the promise of quantitative methods for the analysis of large amounts of texts vis-à-vis the in-depth analysis of qualitative methods. In linguistics, various quantitative methods have been developed for analysing Foreword ix expressions of subjectivity and sentiment in party documents as well as their rhe- torical affordances. The chapters by Gryc and Moilanen, Dahlberg and Sahlgren, and Grijzenhout, Marx and Jijkoun show how adding knowledge of linguistic fea- tures can enhance the potential of quantitative methods. The focus of discourse analysis is on extracting constructions of meaning and analysing the persuasive nature of political discourse in its social context. Montesano Montessori, Eleveld, Filardo-Llamas, and Van Leeuwen show how linguistic formulations and concep- tualisations relate to the social context. Table 1. Qualitative and quantitative methods and genres across chapters. Ch. Authors Data source Methodology Quant / Qual 1 Kleinnijenhuis & Newspapers NET Method Quantitative Van Atteveldt 2 Collette & Pétry Election manifestos Wordfish, Wordscores Quantitative 3 Gryc & Moilanen Political blogs Entity-centric Quantitative document-level sentiment classification 4 Dahlberg & Sahlgren Blogs, websites Random Indexing Quantitative political parties and Qualitative 5 Hirst, Riabinin, Graham, Parliamentary Machine Learning Quantitative Boizot-Roche & Morris proceedings 6 Grijzenhout, Marx Parliamentary Sentiment analysis Quantitative & Jijkoun proceedings Machine Learning 7 Wesley Political texts Qualitative document Qualitative analysis 8 Montesano Montessori Speeches and Critical Discourse/ Qualitative declarations narrative analysis 9 Eleveld Interviews and Discourse/narrative Qualitative other documents analysis 10 Filardo-Llamas Speeches Critical discourse Qualitative analysis 11 Van Leeuwen Parliamentary Stylistic analysis Qualitative speeches 12 Boyd Text comments on Critical discourse Quantitative political videos analysis and Qualitative 13 Krouwel & Wall Election manifestos, Content analysis Quantitative party documents and Qualitative 14 Van Elfrinkhof, Maks Election manifestos Wordscores, Quantitative & Kaal subjectivity analysis, and Qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis
Description:The list of books you might like
