NATIONALIST POPULISM AND POST-COMMUNISM

3.3. Political discourse and discourse analysis The role of language in shaping the political discourse and political culture of the elite – as well as the mass political culture – should not be underestimated. Therefore, a more detailed focus on the political discourse and a discourse analysis is appropriate. According to Teun van Dijk: “Members of a particular society are involved on a daily basis in a multitude of different discourses that express and confirm their dominance over the members of various groups, including the ethnic ones. Such discourses are not simply innocent forms of language use or marginal types of verbal social interaction. Rather, they have a fundamental impact on the social cognitions of dominant group members, on the acquisition, confirmation, and uses of opinions, attitudes, and ideologies underlying social perceptions, actions and structures.” 76 AsTeun van Dijk further argues, the discourse expresses and influences social cognitions such as ethnic prejudices, and this contributes to their acquisition, use and reproduction in everyday life. 77 Discourse, and particularly political discourse, is therefore crucially involved in various stages of decision-making. Accordingly, the political discourse, due to its symbolic and explanatory value, reflects to a significant extent the general political culture of a particular society and contributes to a complex study of the political systems from a comparative perspective. In this study, the terms “discourse” and “discourse analysis” are understood in quite a narrow way. The approach that is used reflects the fact that a discourse analysis is both multi- and interdisciplinary. It displays more similarities to a critical discourse analysis than to a classical content analysis, 78 while the emphasis is on the understanding of discourse in relation to social structural variables, such as ethnicity, as well as to particular social and political problems or events. The objects of the analysis differ from one case to another – the analytical units are usually small paragraphs or at least sentences, which are categorised according to their semantic meaning. 76 T. van Dijk, “Elite Discourse and the Reproduction of Racism”, http://www.discourses.org/ OldArticles/Elite%20discourse%20and%20the%20reproduction%20of%20racism.pdf, p. 3. 77 See T. van Dijk, “Political Discourse and Racism: Describing Others in Western parliaments”, Stephen Harold Riggins (ed.) The Language and Politics of Exclusion. Others in Discourse . (Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997), p. 33. 78 See also L. A. Wood, R. O. Kroger Doing Discourse Analysis . (Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000), p. 18.

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