Abstract Research on issues of women has largely focused attention on, among others, power asymmetries and gender stereotypes, with less emphasis on positive linguistic mechanisms of women. Drawing ...on a critical discourse analytical approach and using Ghanaian parliamentary debates as data, this paper examines how female members of parliament (MPs) construct solidarity. The paper finds that, first, Ghanaian female MPs construct solidarity by positioning themselves as agents and the voice of (Ghanaian) women by using the inclusive- we and our/us . Second, the MPs engage in solidarity formation for (Ghanaian) women empowerment by championing the cause of women and calling for female empowerment. Third, the MPs demonstrate solidarity through congratulatory messages that highlight the achievements of (Ghanaian) women. Finally, the MPs resist discourses that discriminate against (Ghanaian) women. This paper highlights the need for marginalized voices to be centred in CDA research and contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on reparative critical practices.
Abstract
On the 1st October 2017 an independence referendum was organised in Catalonia. The aim of this paper is to analyse the
nature of the political debate going on in the Catalan Parliament ...during the whole process by focusing on the kind of argumentation
strategies that were used by each of the leanings to legitimise their political decisions. We do that relying on a methodological
distinction that differentiates between sound argumentation and fallacious argumentation. By using a Critical Discourse Analysis approach,
this study offers a wide picture of the kind of argumentation used by the main political actors involved in the process of decision making
in Catalonia. The results show that there is more emphasis in antagonising with the others, than engaging in sound argument exchange that
could facilitate minimal points of consensus. Such results may help explain why the Catalan conflict is still unsolved at the political
level.
In contemporary politics, the category of victimhood confers rights and recognition. An inclusive discussion about the construction and conferral of victimhood, which includes individuals from ...different social backgrounds, need be informed by the possible uses of victimhood in political discourse. The present study investigates how individuals and groups are positioned as victims by mainstream Swedish politicians. A constructionist discourse analysis inspired by positioning theory was performed of eight longer political speeches and fifty-six addresses to the Swedish parliament, held over the course of a year. The results suggest that individuals in the ‘normal’ majority, comprising the most numerous and normatively dominant group of society, were positioned as victims. Heterodox minorities, which had fundamentally different morals and political ambitions compared to the ‘normal’ majority, were positioned as offenders. The study argues that a more inclusive construction of victimhood could be accomplished by engaging with heterodox minorities through dialogue.
Despite Germany’s Paris Agreement pledge and coal exit legislation, the political debate around carbon-intensive coal remains heated. Coal power and mining have played an important, yet changing role ...in the history of German politics. In this paper, we analyze the entire parliamentary debate on coal in the German parliament (Bundestag) from its inception in 1949 to 2019. For this purpose we extract the more than 870,000 parliamentary speeches from all protocols in the history of the Bundestag. We identify the 9167 speeches mentioning coal and apply dynamic topic modeling – an unsupervised machine learning technique that reveals the changing thematic structure of large document collections over time – to analyze changes in parliamentary debates on coal over the past 70 years. The trends in topics and their varying internal structure reflect how energy policy was discussed and legitimized over time: Initially, coal was framed as a driver of economic prosperity and guarantee of energy security. In recent years, the debate evolved towards energy transition, coal phase-out and renewable energy expansion. Germany’s smaller and younger parties, the Greens and the Left Party, debate coal more often in the context of the energy transition and climate protection than other parties. Our results reflect trends in other countries and other fields of energy policy. Methodologically, our study illustrates the potential of and need for computational methods to analyze vast corpora of text and to complement traditional social science methods.
This article employs the concept of respectability and the discursive representation of gender equality policies to discuss how surrogacy is represented in Nordic parliamentary debates and policy ...documents. The article’s objective is to study how respectability, problems and equality are represented and discursively and rhetorically produced through a comparative study of Finnish and Norwegian political discourses on domestic unpaid surrogacy and cross-border commercial surrogacy. The article uses rhetorical and discursive analysis to analyse the Finnish and Norwegian Parliaments’ bills, members’ initiatives and proceedings from 2002 to 2018. Finland’s policy on surrogacy has evolved from an unregulated and permissive approach towards a more restrictive one, with discourses focusing on medicalisation, equality, altruism and safety concerning domestic surrogacy and problems and risks concerning cross-border surrogacy. Norway’s policy on surrogacy has been restrictive consistently, with discourses focusing on surrogacy as a transnational social problem involving exploitation of women and children, and biocentrism. Analysing surrogacy regulation in Nordic welfare states, the author concludes that policies and parliamentary debates in both countries have expressed expectations for inclusive health policies and social security for families. Cross-border surrogacy is characterised as an unwanted consequence of globalisation and marketisation of reproduction. Surrogate mothers’ respectability is constructed through rhetoric on differences in terms of nationality, class and binary representations of female caring and instrumentalism.
Slum eradication has been a concern in South Asian cities since the colonial times. Legislation and policies are being framed both out of national desires and international strategies. However, very ...little is being studied on how these legislation and policies come into being, specifically geography's influence in their formulation. The article analyses parliamentary debates from India (Rajya Sabha, 1953–2014), and outlines the process of historical, political, and institutional dominance of Delhi. It shows that the slum legislation and policies in India are formulated by ing cases from the Delhi slums. This knowledge hegemony of Delhi is discussed within the growing consideration towards urban theory's southern shift, which puts the Southern cities (megacities) as underdogs. The paper argues that at a regional level, these megacities exert the same hegemony that the southern theory wants to avoid. The results argue towards broadening the southern theory and ordinary city discussions.
Given the increasingly polarized debates in many modern democracies over migration and integration, the behaviour of members of parliament (MPs) with a migrant background has important implications ...for patterns of representation. Drawing on role congruity theory, we hypothesize that MPs with a migrant background deliver more legislative speeches in debates that are of interest for citizens with a migrant background. The findings, which are based on speeches delivered in the German Bundestag between 2009 and 2013, indicate that MPs of immigrant origin, in particular those MPs who have a "visible" migrant background, deliver significantly more speeches in debates focusing on civil rights. We also find that migrant MPs who are elected via the party list, as opposed to MPs who are directly elected in a district, are more likely to speak in debates on citizen and minority rights, suggesting that the parliamentary party leadership strategically selects migrant MPs as speakers in certain parliamentary debates.
The relationship between original and induced preferences in affecting political actions has been a recurrent topic in the literature. Less attention has been devoted to investigating the interaction ...between these two preferences, and possible neutralising/reinforcing effects. We explore this dynamic on a crucial issue in XIX century Italy, the 'Questione Romana', employing a quantitative analysis on an original corpus of legislative speeches (1861-1870). The absence of strong parties allows investigating the relationship between MPs' original preferences and that induced by their voters' linkage. Moreover, as politicians and voters were part of the same elite, we can check how their paths of political socialisation shape this relationship, leading to aligned or colliding preferences.
•The quantitative analysis in terms of topic words and their correlation for mining and analysis of foreign relations is lacked and needed.•A framework for studying foreign relations is proposed and ...tested with British parliamentary texts.•Five communities are identified and the distribution of topics related to China is extremely unbalanced and highly concentrated.•Evolution patterns of main topics are widely different in terms of continuity and development trends.•The case study on UK-China relations contribute to deepen the understanding of international relations between the two countries, so as to provide valuable references and suggestions for the government and researchers.
Parliamentary texts are records of discussions of domestic and international affairs, which reflect national attitudes and development trends in foreign relations. In this paper, a research framework is proposed to analyze foreign relations on the basis of parliamentary texts. First, topic words are extracted from parliamentary texts, and then a co-word network is constructed to represent the correlation structure of topic words. The basic statistics, calculation of network indicators, community detection, and visualization of network maps and evolution venation, as well as the depiction of a strategic diagram, elucidate deeper characteristics and connotations of foreign relations. This case study on UK-China relations during the period of 2011-2017 using British parliamentary texts reveals the following findings. Over this period, UK-China relations changed in terms of the topics involved, topics which are greatly unbalanced in distribution, but are quite concentrated. Five different directions exist, centering on Trade, Human rights, Nuclear, Steel, and Visa. The evolution of topics includes merging and differentiation. A minority of topics exhibit marked continuity, which constitute the main focal points discussed each year, such as Economy and Trade. Regarding development trends, themes related to trade and steel remain focal points in UK-China relations. Overall, the framework proposed in this paper is proven to be both effective and feasible, and its application through this case study can foster a deeper understanding of the status and development of UK-China relations.
This article analyses the two national parliamentary debates on the new Islam law of 2015 using a Viennese School of Critical Discourse Analysis. It asks how the new Islam law was framed from the ...perspectives of the political parties in power and of those in opposition. It also shows in detail which arguments were raised to defend, alter or support the proposed law by identifying the list of topoi used. It asks especially how racist arguments were debated between on one side a comparably tolerant Austrian system of laws on religion, and on the other, the dominant rightwing populist Freedom Party of Austria, which aimed to foster Islamophobia.
PDF
