Studies of the discursive aspect of populism have tended to focus on the rhetorical manifestations of populist discourses, namely how populist politicians 'talk politics'. However, scant attention ...has been devoted to how politicians rhetorically characterise the concept of populism itself. This article investigates a corpus (N = 4.835) of parliamentary debates in Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, to assess the different definitions of populism used by politicians and explain any variations found. Results show that the ways that politicians describe populism vary cross-nationally in terms of topics, adjectives and targets. A more positive attitude towards populism is likely for politicians who express anti-elitism and opposition to multiculturalism and corruption, regardless of the topic under discussion. Moreover, the effect of political ideology on politicians' attitudes towards populism is more pronounced when economic topics are under discussion. Discussing these findings, this study offers interesting implications for the literature on populism, parliamentary affairs, party politics and text analysis.
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.2013655 .
There is currently no clarity on what Islamophobia covers: Does it relate to hostility towards Islam, hostility towards Muslims or racism against Muslims? While some argue that the term Muslimophobia ...should replace Islamophobia due to the hostility being directed at Muslims as people, rather than Islam the religion, it is not clear whether this is the case in practice. This article examines expressions of Islamophobia and Muslimophobia and their relationship to racism in Swiss parliamentary debates on banning the construction of minarets in Switzerland. It demonstrates that Islamophobia and Muslimophobia are different from each other but mostly occur in tandem. Furthermore, Muslimophobia can be but is not always a form of racism due to the ‘manipulation of culture’ in which proponents of the ban can de-essentialise, as well as essentialise, cultural traits to argue that Muslims can become integrated if they fulfil certain conditions. Such conditions can, however, be easily manipulated to continually exclude undesirable ‘others’. The article contends that the minaret ban initiative relied heavily on the ‘slippery slope’ fallacy to make both Islamophobic and Muslimophobic arguments, that is, accusing Muslims and Islam of transgressions against Swiss society that have not even occurred.
Why is it that when debating the economic crisis, actors in the Portuguese parliament invoke more frequently countries affected by the crisis, whereas actors in the Spanish parliament invoke ...economically well-off countries more often? This article explores this mystery by studying how and why certain countries are evoked in the decision-making process. The analysis reveals that the actors mention different countries to contextualize the nation. We argue the actors in these two countries resort to different reference groups to identify or distance the nation in this concrete period even if they present similar challenges.
We studied the implementation of banking regulation in Sweden from the origin of the commercial banking system until the important Banking Act of 1911. We also looked at the effects of these ...regulations. We found that regulations were often influenced by banker interests rather than by macroeconomic rationale, to the extent that banking legislation was an endogenous part of the banking business. Regulatory regimes that were rule-based (non-discretionary) and open for competition by providing clear and general benchmarks for establishments were more beneficial for financial and economic development than more protective and discretionary legislation. On the other hand, protective and discretionary legislation went hand in hand with bankers having greater influence on legislation.
Our paper presents a diachronic corpus linguistic approach to the conceptualisation and framing of 'risk' in German parliamentary discourse. We analyse all occurrences of risk based on the complete ...collection of plenary protocols of the German Bundestag covering the legislative periods 1-18 (1949-2017). We apply methods used in Digital Discourse Analysis to show how the concept of 'risk' changes through time. Therefore, we investigate co-occurrences to find typical collocations and contexts. We measured three peaks: the first in the late 1950s, the second from the 1970s onwards, and the third in the first decade of the new millennium. We show that 'risk' as a negative and 'chance' as a positive concept have partly taken the communicative place of 'danger' and 'possibility'. The collocates of risk that can be related to different knowledge domains increase until 2009. This hints at the growing importance of risk thematizations in more and more thematic contexts. Technology and economics turn out to be the most important of these contexts. The analysis shows a clear tendency towards a negative and rather generic use of the word risk. Our results provide for the first time a data-driven insight into the long-term development of the 'risk' concept in political discourse of the Federal Republic of Germany.
The paper focuses on the use case of parliamentary debates as part of
Digital Humanities. First, the ParlaMint project is outlined as a flagship initiative of CLARIN ERIC infrastructure. The project ...makes content from the national and regional parliaments visible, comparable and accessible for policy making and research. Then, the approaches are considered that have been applied in the creation of 31 corpora from national and regional parliaments. Last but not least, the utility of the multilingual resource is discussed.
This article focuses on discourses on populism, presenting a case study on the United Kingdom. Analysing all references to populism in the British Parliament from 1970 to 2018, this article provides ...a framework to think about rhetoric and populism, a method to investigate political attitudes, and insights about the debate on populism in the United Kingdom. Results show that from the 1970s to the 1990s politicians interpret populism in demagogical terms and most often refer to the category of the political role of ‘the people’. More recently, negative references and personal attacks increase, and politicians refer to different categories. Moreover, the analysis shows how British politicians employ epideictic and forensic rhetorical strategies more often when debating about populism, whereas deliberative strategies rarely emerge. Finally, the investigation over the 2015–2018 period shows that government membership, a distant election, and a right-wing party membership increase the likelihood of rhetorical positive interpretations of populism.
Since the end of the Cold War, Italy has radically transformed its foreign and security policy, participating in several Military Operations Abroad (MOA) across the world. A few qualitative studies ...have already analysed how Italian parties debated and voted on this issue, underlining a bipartisan consensus between centre-left and centre-right parties, based on a common humanitarian narrative. This article provides a substantial methodological contribution to this research agenda, explaining party support in Italy for the six most relevant MOAs during the so-called 'Second Republic' (1994-2013), through the employment of automated text analysis and linear regression models. In line with existing literature on the party politics of military interventions, the findings indicate a curvilinear distribution of support across the left-right axis, the strong impact of government-opposition dynamics and the interaction between international legitimacy of the specific operation and ideological leaning.
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