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.
Radical right populist parties have often been treated as “pariahs,” being excluded from coalition politics in parliamentary democracies. We argue that negative rhetoric targeted at radical right ...populist parties in legislative debates is used by the established parties to distance themselves from such parties and that the incentives to do so depend on the political context. Using sentiment analysis of speeches in the Swedish Riksdag from 2010 to 2022, we find that rhetoric targeted toward the radical right Sweden Democrats is more negative than speech concerning other parties on average. We also find that this negative rhetoric declined over time, particularly from the center-right parties, as the formerly marginal Sweden Democrats gained more seats and became a potential partner for cooperation. Our analysis demonstrates how tracking parliamentary discourse provides insights into changing party dynamics. Our findings suggest that, as the prospects for populists' pariah status change, rhetoric from established parties reflects this shifting role in party politics, with enduring negativity accompanied by reduced hostility among the center-right parties with the greatest potential for cooperation.
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.
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.
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.
This open access book focuses on the importance that EU politicization has gained in European democracies and the consequences for voting behaviour in six countries of the EU: Belgium, Germany, ...Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. Most of the studies which research the way the EU is being legitimised focus on the European Parliament elections. In this book we argue that to understand how EU accountability works, it is necessary to focus instead on national elections and the national political environment. Through a detailed, multimethod analysis this book establishes rigorously the paths of European accountability at the national level, its propitious contexts in the media and parliamentary debates, and whether the paths are similar from Greece to Germany. The findings have implications for both national and European Union democracy, underlining the importance that national institutions have in enabling citizens to hold the EU accountable.
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.
In 2021, the Conservative UK government announced a proposal to introduce mandatory voter identification (ID) in elections, raising concerns around how these measures might disenfranchise already ...marginalised groups. Using computational content analysis techniques, this study analyses all parliamentary debates to date on voter ID to understand how political elites frame these requirements. Despite voter ID being justified as necessary to tackle voter fraud when the new Elections Bill was first announced, this study instead finds both Conservative and Labour Members of Parliament agree voter fraud numbers are small. Conservatives nevertheless significantly frame voter ID as necessary to strengthen public confidence in the electoral system, which contrasts Electoral Commission's 2021 data instead finding 90% of the public consider voting to be safe from fraud at the polling station. Overall, this study sheds light to the 'framing contest' and polarisation present in parliamentary debates about voter ID, an increasingly contentious issue of the proposed Elections Bill.
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