Bruno Wueest

Electoral Campaigns and Relation Mining: Extracting Semantic Network Data from Newspaper Articles

ABSTRACT Among the many applications in social science for the entry and management of data, there are only a few software packages that apply natural language processing to identify semantic concepts such as issue categories or political statements by actors. Although these procedures usually allow efficient data collection, most have difficulty in achieving sufficient accuracy because of the high complexity and mutual relationships of the variables used in the social sciences. To address these flaws, we suggest a (semi-) automatic annotation approach that implements an innovative coding method (Core Sentence Analysis) by computational linguistic techniques (mainly entity recognition, concept identification, and dependency parsing). Although such computational linguistic tools have been readily available for quite a long time, social scientists have made astonishingly little use of them. The principal aim of this article is to gather data on party-issue relationships from newspaper articles. In the first stage, we try to recognize relations between parties and issues with a fully automated system. This recognition is extensively tested against manually annotated data of the coverage in the boulevard newspaper Blick of the Swiss national parliamentary elections of 2003 and 2007. In the second stage, we discuss possibilities for extending our approach, such as by enriching these relations with directional measures indicating their polarity.

Measuring the Public Accountability of New Modes of Governance

We present an encompassing research endeavour on the public accountability of new modes of governance in Europe. The aim of this project is to measure the salience, tonality and framing of regulatory bodies and public interest organisations in newspaper coverage and parliamentary debates over the last 15 years. In order to achieve this, we use language technology which is still underused in political science text analyses. Institutionally, the project has emerged from a collaboration between a computational linguistics and a political science department.

Conclusion: United in Diversity

This chapter summarizes the most important empirical evidence and discusses the ramifications of the findings in the light of the broader research questions. First, it explains why the literature on discursive institutionalism had been missing a quantitative study so far. It accordingly shows how the adoption of a rigorous comparative perspective, and the construction of valid indicators for the discursive actions, make it possible to draw statistically reliable inferences on the structure and substance of public discourse on economic liberalization. Second, this concluding chapters discusses how the results cater to the influential theoretical frameworks in comparative political economy that emphasize divergence, and, at the same time, also acknowledge the propositions by the globalization and neo-Gramscian research, which argue in favor of convergence among advanced economies. Convergence, or unity, is found in terms of the substance of discourse, which is coined by the emergence of a pro-market mainstream in public discourse. Divergence, in contrast, is found in the structure of discourses. This points to influential historical legacies, which keep public discourses on economic liberalization in the six countries on different paths.

Designing the Discourse Analysis

This chapter presents the methods of data collection and analysis. Most importantly, the measurement and aggregation of the four discursive actions—going public, policy position-taking, valence attributing, and framing—are presented. Further, the research design in terms of the country and newspaper selection as well as the underlying concepts of discourse coalitions are discussed.

Unity on the Substance of Discourse

This chapter offers a first account of the substance of discourse by analyzing the degree and exact nature of internationalization in the different countries and arenas. It shows that public conflict in the six countries are similarly affected by a domestic and an international divide. In addition, this chapter corroborates the finding that the overall policy climate of public discourse has largely converged across countries. More precisely, five distinct discursive coalitions are identified: the radical and moderate mainstream coalitions, which are the linchpins of the pro-market dominance, as well as traditional left, protectionist and interventionist coalitions challenging the pro-market mainstream. The varying constellation of these coalitions across the different contexts also reveal that although the pro-market mainstream in general prevails, it is heavily challenged in the input arenas and single countries such as France. The study of framing, finally, shows that the prevalence of promarket ideas also develops in terms of the justifications underlying specific policy positions. Liberalist frames thus mostly eclipse social democratic and mercantilist arguments.

Institutional and Structural Foundations of Discourse

This chapter consists mainly of a dialogue between theoretical arguments and first cursory empirical results. It establishes the historical foundations of public discourse and reviews the extant literature. Hence, this chapter will focus on the development of the economic situation in Western Europe over the last four decades and its interplay with the role of the state in economic policy-making. It will show that public discourse on economic liberalization has taken place in a context of increasing internationalization and post-industrialization and against the background of the emergence of the regulatory state. These transformations are linked to changes in the substance of economic liberalization discourse. On the one hand, it becomes evident that mainstream party convergence and the internationalization of conflicts have led to a dominance of pro-market mainstream ideas. On the other hand, this chapter elaborates on the interplay between the institutional context of countries and arenas as well as public discourse. To be precise, it is argued that the openness and coordinative function of of public discourse increase its conflict intensity.

Diversity in the Structure of Discourse

This chapter confirms that, although resourceful actors dominate discourse in all countries, the accessibility and functionality of discourse decisively varies according to the institutional contexts. As a result, conflict intensity, measured as the polarization of policy positions and patterns of valence attributions, varies closely according to the different capitalist regime types and arenas. This leads to the conclusion that the relationship between conflict intensity and institutional contexts is systematic: open and coordinative discourses, such as, for example, in Germany, are very contentious, while closed and communicative discourses, such as, for example, in the UK , are particularly quiescent.

Introduction: Mapping Economic Liberalization Discourse in Western Europe

The first chapter outlines the task of the study, which is a mapping of the different discourses inherent in six major European democracies. To this aim, it introduces the theoretical model that will guide the following elaborations on the unity in substance and the differences in structure of public discourses. Sketched in very bold strokes, it is argued that the similarities between discourses are to be traced in the common thread provided by globalization and post-industrialization, whereas the differences can be explained by virtue of the distinct institutional arrangements that the countries in question have developed over time.