A Text Network Analysis of Discursive Changes in German, Austrian and Swiss New Year’s Speeches 2000-2021

Abstract

<p>New Year’s speeches held by leading politicians–mostly prime ministers or presidents–have a long and firm tradition in Europe and have become an institution instead of being a crowing event for conciliatory efforts. From the perspective of political communication, New Year’s speeches fulfil a triple function in the intersection of the past, the present and the future. First, they summarise the past year from the perspective of the political leadership and, hence, recall, reconstruct and remind the most important events of the year. Second, New Year’s speeches describe the present and, thus, can be understood and analysed as reality constructions, as windows to the current state of affairs. And third, New Year’s speeches serve as road maps to the future, into the new year. In this sense, a New Year’s speeches summarises the most important future challenges, expectations and opportunities. <br></p><p>This article stems from the assumption that a nonlinear analysis of textual data based on network analysis could provide us with new ontological understanding about structural coherence and holes within a document corpora. It adopts a different viewpoint to discourse analysis based on social network analysis. The paper introduces a nonlinear way to analyse texts as networks in order to visualise and analyse how concepts are connected and to explore structural closeness and holes within a corpus of unstructured textual documents.</p><p>The results indicate a discursive turn in Germany, Austria and Switzerland after the breakout of the global financial crisis in 2008. But at the same time, the results evidence similarities across the three countries how the crisis and its impact was framed to discourses. In all countries, the use of concepts related to crisis and insecurity has increased dramatically since 2008. However, this vocabulary is not solely limited to the financial crisis. The “insecurity and crisis” frame referred both to the financial crisis, the armed conflict in Ukraine and to the refugee crisis.</p>