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From Text to Political Positions: Text analysis across disciplines
Edited by Bertie Kaal, Isa Maks and Annemarie van Elfrinkhof
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 55] 2014
► pp. 297–324

From Text to Political Positions

The Convergence of Political, Linguistic and Discourse Analysis

| VU University Amsterdam
| VU University Amsterdam
| VU University Amsterdam

This chapter explores how three methods of political text analysis can complement each other to differentiate parties in detail. A word-frequency method and corpus linguistic techniques are joined by critical discourse analysis in an attempt to assess the ideological relation between election manifestos and a coalition agreement. How does this agreement relate to the policy positions presented in individual election manifestos and whose issues appear on the governmental agenda? The chapter discusses the design of three levels of text analysis applying text-as-data analysis; words-as-meaningful-data involving lexical-semantic analysis of subjectivity applying Wordscores; and words-in-context analysis for variation in constructions of worldviews. A comparison of the results reveals (im-)possibilities of combining qualitative with quantitative methods. We found that better results can be achieved for party positioning in combinations of qualitative and quantitative approaches.

Published online: 7 May 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.55.14elf
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Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Kaal, Bertie
2015. HOW ‘REAL’ ARE TIME AND SPACE IN POLITICALLY MOTIVATED WORLDVIEWS?. Critical Discourse Studies 12:3 ► pp. 330 ff. DOI logo
Kovář, Jan
2019. Chapter 7. Variations of metaphors in party manifestos about EU finality. In Variation in Political Metaphor [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 85], ► pp. 151 ff. DOI logo
Kovář, Jan
2020. Czech party positions on the EU’s finality: a conceptual metaphor approach. Journal of International Relations and Development 23:2 ► pp. 462 ff. DOI logo

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