From Text to Political Positions: Text Analysis across Disciplines

346 Pages·2014·2.26 MB·English

by  Bertie Kaal (ed.)

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