Search results for "parliamentary debate"

Conflicting conceptualisations of ‘democracy’ in the German Bundestag during the anti-nuclear demonstrations, 1995-2001

2018

A vigorous anti-nuclear movement emerged in Germany in the mid 1990s, when spent nuclear fuel elements began to be transported to the interim storage facility in Gorleben, Lower Saxony. Resistance to nuclear transportation continued to grow in strength throughout the 1990s. The protests expressed people’s distrust and lack of confidence in political institutions and decision-making processes. In the German Bundestag, these events relating to Gorleben caused significant political struggles over the principles and meanings of German democracy. Parliamentarians voiced competing counterarguments about the legitimacy of these demonstrations, on the one hand, and the legitimacy of the nuclear ene…

Political science as a topic in post-war German Bundestag debates

2020

The conceptual history of politics in post-WWII (West-) Germany is connected to the history of academic political science. From the Bundestag plenary debates (beginning in September 1949) both the controversies on the political science itself and the contributors of both contemporary scholars and the ‘classics’ of the understanding of politics can be studied. The digitalisation of parliamentary debates opens up new chances for conceptual research in this regard. The article studies the conceptual commitments in the use of the discipline titles (Politikwissenschaft, Politische Wissenschaft, Politologie, Politikforschung, Politische Theorie, also political science) and actors (Politologe, Pol…

Conditions of cultural citizenship: intersections of gender, race and age in public debates on family migration

2015

This article analyses problem framings in public debates on family migration in Finland. The study focuses on the less-examined category of age and how it intersects with gender, race and religion. We examine the discursive context within which parliamentarians and the media negotiate questions of migration policies, belonging and citizenship. Our analysis identifies problem framings by combining frame analysis with the ‘What is the problem represented to be?’ approach, which understands policies as problematizations. We found that the debates held up the rather common notion of vulnerable women and children as groups that tighter family migration policies protect. The debates excluded cert…

Submitting “Alternative Facts” to Debate: A Weberian Perspective on Post-truth Politics

2018

'Oxford Dictionaries' chose “post-truth” as the “Word of the Year 2016”, while the association of German linguists (Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache) did the same for '“postfaktische Politik'”. “Alternative facts”, launched by Kellyanne Conway concerning the attendance at Donald Trump’s inaugural, was a third variant in this cluster. In this article, I shall discuss Max Weber’s parliamentary perspective on the critique of given facts and of the powers of science in relation to the debates around post-truth politics. A critical assessment of Leo Strauss’s critique of Weber as a nihilist and relativist introduces the problematic. One aim of the article is to illustrate how even trivial sloga…

Encapsulació lèxica i avaluació en el debat parlamentari

2018

Lexical encapsulation consists of a series of abstract unspecific nouns (fact, plan...) referring to predicative antecedents. This study is based on a corpus of parliamentary debate in English, Catalan and Spanish (PD) and deals with encapsulation as a complex lexical cohesion device which allows the addressor to evaluate the information of the debates in various ways. Our work tries to highlight the role of lexical encapsulation to reflect the addressor’s positioning with respect to the topic discussed, and to establish whether there are outstanding cross-linguistic differences. In order to delimit the diverse evaluative strategies, an approach from the perspective of prototype theory is a…

Politicisation as a Speech Act: A Repertoire for Analysing Politicisation in Parliamentary Plenary Debates

2021

This chapter analyses the actual speech acts of politicisation among parliamentarians, which also makes it possible to set the current debates among European Union (EU) scholars in a wider context. My aim is to sketch a scheme for distinguishing different aspects of politicisation, referring to concepts of politics (sphere or activity and its specific aspects), to the politicisation of topics or persons, to its time dimensions (past, present, and future), to different activities of politicisation (adversaries, unintended changes, the actors themselves), as well as to opposing evaluations of politicisation. The data set consists of the plenary debates of the UK House of Commons, the (West) G…

The use and abuse of parliamentary concepts in Hungarian parliamentary debates, 1920–27

2020

During and after the First World War, discourses calling for constitutional reform pervaded Europe. The break-up of the continental empires, the emergence of the new nation-states, and the western calls for democratization collectively gave rise to transnational debates about parliamentarization and parliamentary government. However, in the diverse and contingent post-war political environment, at the same time these ideals were given profoundly nation-specific meanings. They were implemented in the process of nation-building in equally diverse national contexts. This article analyses the use and abuse of the parliamentary concepts and their vernacular redescriptions in Hungarian parliament…

Political culture in the Indonesian Parliament : analyzing parliamentary debates on the regional parliaments 1999-2009

2015

Metonymy in Spanish and American parliamentary speeches: Obama’s State of the Union Address versus Rajoy’s State of the Nation Address

2018

This study attempts to analyze the metonymies used in the Economy section of two equivalent parliamentary speeches: the 2015 State of the Union Address in the US and the 2015 State of the Nation Debate in Spain, which belong to two different debate traditions. The present study aims at answering the following research questions:What metonymies do President Obama and Prime Minister Rajoy use in their American and Spanish parliamentary speeches in an attempt to convince the public of economic victory?What are the similarities and differences between the role of metonymy in shaping public opinion about economic recovery in America and Spain in both speeches?To answer these questions, we use th…

Speaking of politics in parliament : experiences of writing a book on the digitized Bundestag debates, 1949–2017

2022

This article consists of ex post methodological reflections on the procedures and practices that I applied in my monograph Politik als parlamentarischer Begriff: Perspektiven aus den Plenardebatten des Deutschen Bundestags (Leverkusen, 2021). The book analyses through 18 parliamentary terms the conceptualization of politics in German Bundestag plenary debates from 1949 to 2017. The book was an illustration of my long-term aim of combining political theorizing with the empirical analysis of debate. In writing the book, my guiding idea was to apply Ludwig Wittgenstein’s point, that the meaning of a concept lies in its use, to an analysis of how parliamentary debates open a perspective on the …