Analyzing the Role of Values and Ideals in the Development of Energy Systems: How Values, Their Idealizations, and Technologies Shape Political Decision-Making.

This study examines an important aspect of energy history and policy: the intertwinement of energy technologies with ideals. Ideals play an important role in energy visions and innovation pathways. Aspirations to realize technical, social, and political ideals indicate a long-term commitment in the design of energy systems, distinguishable from commitment to other abstract goals, such as values. This study offers an analytical scheme that could help to conceptualize these differences and their impact on energy policy. In the proposed model, two spheres of interaction are highlighted: a material sphere in which values and technologies co-evolve, and an imaginary sphere in which ideals interact with idealized technologies. Furthermore, the relation between these two spheres can be understood in different ways. This study examines three cases that are illustrative of the different roles of ideals in the development of energy technologies and visions: (1) the evolution of safety in nuclear reactor design; (2) visions of atomic power in France; (3) the political idealization of a tidal power scheme in the Severn Estuary. Finally, the developed model implies more general insights for the development of sociotechnical systems. Amongst others, it shows why certain projects and technologies remain a political, but not a techno-economic option.

The impacts of political activity on fires and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest: An analysis of social media and satellite data.

Social media has become a one-stop shop for consuming news and expressing political views. Politics has become increasingly emotional, and the ensuing polarization has created echo chambers that favor narratives and stories that repeat only one point of view. In this article, we investigated the role of political activity through Twitter (now 'X') engagement as a predictor of destructive fires and deforestation in the Brazilian Legal Amazon (BLA). We used a machine learning approach based on sentiment analysis and satellite data. To test the consistency of the sentiment analysis, we compared the timing of messages related to fire and deforestation events with daily fire data from satellites. When comparing positive and negative comments about fires in the BLA, the results showed that the best model for predicting fire outbreaks is the decision tree regressor. We found evidence that positive comments about agriculture, industry, and the Amazon rainforest in response to speeches and statements by high-ranking Brazilian politicians tend to induce positive comments about fire outbreaks and deforestation. These comments then become good predictors of fire outbreaks with a 6-day lag. These results support the view that high-ranking politicians have enormous power to influence damaging events that can have severe impacts on communities, the environment, and the economy. Brazil has seen an unprecedented increase in deforestation and fires in the Amazon rainforest in recent years. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on the role of social media in real-world events and how machine learning approaches can be used to address this class of problems.

Evaluation Mechanism of Political Discourse: A Holistic Approach.

Taking the economic issue of Trump's First State of the Union Address (SUA) as original data, the present study examined the evaluation features of political speeches by adopting a holistic approach, which includes both macro and micro dimensions. At the macro level, a series of semantic patterns were identified, with Goal-Achievement and General-Example Patterns being the most prevalent. They predetermine the evaluative tone, giving the surrounding statements evaluative meanings, exhibiting the radiating nature of evaluative meaning; at the micro level, a variety of resources have been identified, both explicit and implicit, lexical and syntactical, attitudinal and gradational, which collaborate to reinforce the subjective evaluation, revealing the holistic characteristic in the realization of evaluative meaning. Throughout the analysis, three evaluative mechanisms have been proposed, which are the coupling of meaning, semantic prosody, and tense switching. They collaborate and promote the subjective evaluation to be established and reinforced in a cumulative, gradient or hybrid pattern. In a narrow sense, the present study has partially revealed Trump's political discourse feature. Broadly speaking, it contributes to the theoretical development of the appraisal framework by refining existing evaluation systems through a holistic research paradigm, which in turn facilitates accurate interpretation of various types of discourse.

Lifestyle versus social determinants of health in the Dutch parliament: An automated analysis of debate transcripts.

Although public health scholars increasingly recognize the importance of the social determinants of health (SDOH), health policy outputs tend to emphasize downstream lifestyle factors instead. We use an automated corpus research approach to analyse fourteen years of health policy debate in the Dutch House of Representatives' Health Committee, testing three potential causes of the lack of attention for SDOH: political ideology, by which members of parliament (MPs) from some political orientations may prioritize lifestyle factors over SDOH; lifestyle drift, by which early attention for SDOH during problem analysis is replaced by a lifestyle focus in the development of solutions as the challenges in addressing SDOH become clear; and focusing events, by which political or societal chance events, known to the public and political elites simultaneously, bolster the lifestyle perspective on health. Our analysis shows that overall, the committee spent most of its time discussing neither SDOH nor lifestyle: healthcare financing and service delivery dominated instead. When SDOH or lifestyle were referenced, left-leaning MPs referred significantly more to SDOH and right-leaning MPs significantly more to lifestyle. Temporal effects related to election cycles yielded inconsistent evidence. Finally, peak attention for both lifestyle and SDOH coincided with ongoing political debate instead of exogenous, unforeseen focusing events, and these peaks were rendered relatively insignificant by the larger and more consistent attention for health care. This paper provides a first step toward automated analysis of policy debates at scale, opening up new avenues for the empirical study of health political discourse.

Directives in Covid-19 government guidance: an international comparison.

The importance of language to changing public behaviours is acknowledged in crisis situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic. A key means of achieving these changes is through the use of directive speech acts, yet this area is currently under-researched. This study investigates the use of directives in the 2020 COVID-19 briefings of four leaders of English-speaking nations, Jacinda Adern, Boris Johnson, Scott Morrison, and Nicola Sturgeon. We developed a classification system including 13 directive types and used this to compare directive use across these four leaders, examining directness and forcefulness of directive use. The analysis finds Sturgeon to be the most prolific directive user and also to have the highest reliance on imperatives. Johnson, meanwhile, has a preference for directives involving modal verbs, particularly with first- and second-person pronouns. In contrast, Ardern and Morrison show a higher use of indirect directives, normally thought to be a less effective strategy. While Ardern often combines this strategy with judicious use of imperatives, this is not seen in Morrison's COVID-19 briefings. These findings tend to confirm earlier, more impressionistic evaluations of the communication styles of these leaders but also suggest other avenues for research on directive use. We conclude with implications for political crisis communication and analysis of directives in crisis communication.

'My countrymen have never disappointed me': Politics of service in Modi's speeches during Covid-19.

In this paper I study discursive practices of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to the pandemic, political leadership across the globe had to take tough decisions such as restrictions on the social and personal lives of individuals. This meant addressing concerns over ensuring compliance with these restrictions. I examine how Modi managed these concerns in his communication with the Indian polity over TV and radio broadcasts. I do so in instances where Modi gave specific instructions about following restrictions or other COVID appropriate behaviours. Using discourse analysis, I analyse data from two prominent ways of communicating in the pandemic, Mann Ki Baat and addresses to the nation. Analyses show that Modi developed two sets of non-electoral relations across his communication, which treated compliance as normatively expected: a) between Modi and Indians and b) among Indians themselves. These relations made way for treating audiences as those who are in specific social roles where duty and service were normative. Instructions and their compliance were embedded in these roles and treated as expected and consequently moral acts. Modi's discursive practices worked to perform a politics of service and duty, where compliance is ultimately treated as expected service.

Social media sharing of low-quality news sources by political elites.

Increased sharing of untrustworthy information on social media platforms is one of the main challenges of our modern information society. Because information disseminated by political elites is known to shape citizen and media discourse, it is particularly important to examine the quality of information shared by politicians. Here, we show that from 2016 onward, members of the Republican Party in the US Congress have been increasingly sharing links to untrustworthy sources. The proportion of untrustworthy information posted by Republicans versus Democrats is diverging at an accelerating rate, and this divergence has worsened since President Biden was elected. This divergence between parties seems to be unique to the United States as it cannot be observed in other western democracies such as Germany and the United Kingdom, where left-right disparities are smaller and have remained largely constant.

Living in COVID's Disbeliefs, Media, and Fear: Nurses in Brazil and the United States Share Their Experiences.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses were placed in an unprecedented context in which they engaged with community members, family members, and friends while positioned between dire hospital situations and community disbelief about the seriousness of the pandemic, often along political lines. A secondary analysis of a qualitative study exploring experiences of 39 nurses in the United States and Brazil in engaging with the community and political discourse during the pandemic provided insights into the impact of these interactions on nurses, and implications for how nurses may emerge from this pandemic time stronger and more supported by those in administrative positions.

Upholding justice through music: protesting betrayal in Oromo song, Wal Agarraa.

The study aimed at explicating the linguistic choices subsumed in an Oromo protest song, Wal Agarraa by Galanaa Garoomsaa so as to shed light on the underlying messages as a form of political discourse. Music is considered one of the platforms for expressing discontent among the Oromo. In this research, we explored the textual instrumentality of the lyrics of the song as a form of political discourse in exposing the injustices perpetrated against the Oromo. We adopted Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework to identify the discourses in the song. The study has made it evident that the song has got a number of underlying messages meant to raise the consciousness of the citizens regarding the injustices perpetrated against the Oromo. As such, the central theme of the song is that the Oromo quest for justice will be revealed eventually which the artist foreshadows using the title of the song Wal Agarraa/the time will come/. Furthermore, the functions of coercion, legitimization-delegitimization, and resistance, opposition and dissimulation have been subsumed in the song to convey the imbedded messages. The findings of the study also demonstrate that music goes far beyond simply reflecting and describing the state of affairs but it also becomes a platform through which discursive spaces are opened.

Meaningful crime prevention or just an 'Act':Discourse Analysis of the criminalisation of contract cheating services in Australia.

Contract cheating remains a significant problem for universities and higher education (HE) generally, both within Australia and internationally. In 2020, the Australian Federal Government passed legislation establishing a new criminal offence, criminalising the provision or advertisement of academic cheating services by individuals and businesses. This legislation represents the Australian Government's formal commitment to a criminal justice response to address the problem of contract cheating behaviour, which seeks to prevent and minimise the use and/or promotion of such cheating services within the higher education sector. This paper provides a political discourse analysis (PDA) and interpretive policy analysis (IPA) of Australian Parliamentary Hansard documents regarding debate of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment (Prohibiting Academic Cheating Services) Bill 2019. Our findings suggest a discord between the putative purpose of this legislation and the way the contract cheating problem has been represented in Australian Parliament. We argue that debates regarding the solution to, or at least how to address contract cheating first need to understand and agree on the problem if they are to meaningfully prevent crime. Our analysis exposes the politicisation of the higher education sector and associated discourse, where concern about contract cheating, in this case, was used as a vehicle to further rationalise ongoing Government paternalism and interference in tertiary institutions, underscoring the need for critical evaluation of criminological interventions.

Effects of politicized media coverage: Experimental evidence from the HPV vaccine and COVID-19.

Although concerns about politicization of health and science are not new, the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified attention to how political disagreement over scientific guidelines and recommendations might influence attitudes and behaviors about the health topics in question and might even spill or carry over to affect other attitudes important to public health. The literature employs differing definitions of politicization-at times referring to controversy in the public sphere, at others referring to the exploitation of the uncertainty inherent in science, and at still others referring to whether the issue enters political discourse-all of which are viewed as distinct dimensions by the public. What is not known is how these different aspects of politicization influence public attitudes about the health topics and or broader attitudes about scientific guidelines, and-assuming adverse effects-what strategies might be effective at mitigating the consequences. This paper draws on a survey experiment of 3012U.S. respondents fielded in summer 2020 that was designed as a pilot study to assess the effects of different dimensions of politicization. Findings do not suggest that one type of politicization is necessarily more pernicious than the others. In fact, all types of politicization increased negative emotional responses and confusion, both with respect to the health topic in question (HPV vaccine and COVID-19) but also on other domains, although opinions about policy were unaffected. The findings also suggest that inoculation may have potential as a messaging strategy for blunting the adverse effects of exposure to politicization.

Bridges or walls? A metaphorical dichotomy of Pope Francis versus Donald Trump's views of transnational migration.

Within a wider research line on policy-driven institutional discourses on migration by international/national institutions, NGO and political leaders, this contribution is aimed at illustrating the bipolarized social representations of immigrants inspiring 24 speeches by Pope Francis and US President Donald Trump. Statistical analyses using IRAMUTEQ included "specificity analysis" of discursive forms (words) and "cluster analysis." Results show that the Pope's discourse on migration (articulated into four clusters) is richer than the oversimplified Trump's discourse (originating just one cluster): the words "bridges" and "walls" emerge as representational nuclei of their bipolarized views of transnational migration, as metaphorical dichotomies of inclusive/exclusive policies. Emphasizing the need to build walls to protect the Americans, inspired by the sovereign ideology (AMERICA FIRST!), President Trump does not at all suspect that in the globalized interconnected world the AMERICA FIRST may become just AMERICA ALONE!

Characterizing partisan political narrative frameworks about COVID-19 on Twitter.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis that has been testing every society and exposing the critical role of local politics in crisis response. In the United States, there has been a strong partisan divide between the Democratic and Republican party's narratives about the pandemic which resulted in polarization of individual behaviors and divergent policy adoption across regions. As shown in this case, as well as in most major social issues, strongly polarized narrative frameworks facilitate such narratives. To understand polarization and other social chasms, it is critical to dissect these diverging narratives. Here, taking the Democratic and Republican political social media posts about the pandemic as a case study, we demonstrate that a combination of computational methods can provide useful insights into the different contexts, framing, and characters and relationships that construct their narrative frameworks which individual posts source from. Leveraging a dataset of tweets from the politicians in the U.S., including the ex-president, members of Congress, and state governors, we found that the Democrats' narrative tends to be more concerned with the pandemic as well as financial and social support, while the Republicans discuss more about other political entities such as China. We then perform an automatic framing analysis to characterize the ways in which they frame their narratives, where we found that the Democrats emphasize the government's role in responding to the pandemic, and the Republicans emphasize the roles of individuals and support for small businesses. Finally, we present a semantic role analysis that uncovers the important characters and relationships in their narratives as well as how they facilitate a membership categorization process. Our findings concretely expose the gaps in the "elusive consensus" between the two parties. Our methodologies may be applied to computationally study narratives in various domains. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1140/epjds/s13688-021-00308-4.

Russian Political Discourse on Illegal Drugs: A Thematic Analysis of Parliamentary Debates.

BACKGROUND: Since the beginning of the twenty first century, there has been an intensified political debate about drugs in Russia. The drug problem is now regarded as one of the country's most serious problems and as an issue of top priority for the Russian government. Objectives: The aim of this qualitative study is to explore how illegal drugs are discussed in Russian political discourse. Methods: The material includes an analysis of 177 speeches made in the lower house of the Russian parliament, the Russian State Duma, between 2014 and 2018. The data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis (CDA). Results: In general, the study found that the debate about the drug problem was characterized by consensus, and there were small differences between the Deputy members in their understanding of the problem. Three main understandings of the drug problem were identified: (1) Illegal drugs as an increasing problem in Russia, (2) Drugs as an external threat, and (3) A need for a more repressive drug policy. Conclusion: There was a general consensus about how the drug problem should be regarded among the politicians, with a focus on a war on drugs and an absence of harm reduction ideas.

Confronting Plausible Simplicities and Bridging the Tragic Chasm: Bernard Crick's Political Journalism Reconsidered.

The world of political comment is often considered to be lacking in nuance and sophistication, dominated by immoderate polemicists. This connects to wider debates concerning knowledge and expertise in a liberal democracy, which the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore. The article examines the contribution made to the debate concerning political comment by the British academic, political theorist and journalist Bernard Crick. Crick had a low opinion of much political comment which he believed provided a breeding ground for populist sentiment. For Crick, it was a duty of academics to contribute to the opinion space and elevate the standard of public discourse. The seriousness with which Crick took political journalism was a recognition of the important role it plays in the transmission of political ideas, one often underappreciated by academics. This article looks at Crick's own contribution as a frequent political commentator in the British press and how this connected with his moderate political stance and his conception of political activity. It argues that the example that Crick sets is, despite the very different media and academic landscape he operated in, worth emulating.

Personalised medicine and the state: A political discourse analysis.

The last decade has seen a range of health policy initiatives relating to personalised medicine. There is an emerging body of studies that demonstrates the continued importance of states in the development of personalised medicine. This paper contributes to this literature by focusing on how political discourses construct the role of states in personalised medicine. Based on a case study of the introduction of a national programme in Denmark, the analysis identifies specific discursive mechanisms in this construction. The material consists of documents from key national stakeholders, media coverage and interviews with experts at the national level. The analysis found three types of discursive mechanisms. Firstly, mechanisms can relate to problem definitions, and these were concerned with a number of salient problems of health services. Secondly, mechanisms can relate to underlying assumptions, and these were about the possibility of engineering healthcare improvement through data and by extension personalised medicine. Thirdly, mechanisms can relate to discursive effects, and here the state emerged as a highly influential governor. These mechanisms are likely to be highly relevant for other countries, but future research needs to test this. Health policy practitioners and health administrators thus need to invest effort into influencing political discourses around personalised medicines, in addition to the formulation of policies itself.

Trusted and doubted: Discourses of parenting training in two Swedish official inquiries, 1947 and 2008.

AIM: The aim of this study was to analyse discourses of parenting training in official inquires in Sweden that explicitly deal with the bringing up of children and parental education and how the representations of the problems and their solutions affect parental subject positions in the early welfare state and at the onset of the 21st century. METHOD: We carried out a discourse analysis of two public inquiries of 1947 and 2008, drawing on theories about governmentality and power regimes. Tools from political discourse analysis were used to investigate the objectives of political discourse practices. RESULTS: Both inquiries referred to a context of change and new life demands as a problem. Concerning suggestions for solutions, there were discrepancies in parents' estimated need of expert knowledge and in descriptions of parental capacity. In a discourse of trust and doubt, the parents in 1947 were positioned as trusted welfare partners and secure raisers of future generations, and in 2008, as doubted adults, feared to be faltering in their child-rearing tasks. CONCLUSIONS: The analysis revealed how governmental problem descriptions, reasoning about causes and suggestions of solutions influenced parents' subject positions in a discourse of trust and doubt, and made way for governmental interventions with universal parenting training in the 21st century.

Reference to Self and Other in the Digital Public Sphere: The Case of Political Blogs.

In this paper, we analyze how a political blog author (Spanish Alejo Vidal-Quadras) establishes the reference to self and other in his blog entries. We furthermore look into how the commentators to this blog react and establish reference to self and other in the digital public sphere. More concretely, we show that they not only take up the references established by the main blog author but also create new references. These allow, on the one hand, for profiling themselves as part of a group and, on the other hand, identifying their interlocutor among the variety of possible interlocutors in the digital public sphere. By addressing different interlocutors, the commentators turn the comments section into a dialogic space, a dimension that is lacking in the main blog entries. However, the fact that they almost invariably identify interlocutors other than Vidal-Quadras but address Vidal-Quadras without explicitly identifying him, shows that Vidal-Quadras remains the main ratified interlocutor in view of his ownership of the blog. This paper shows then how participants in the digital public sphere create a complex relationship of self and other reference in political blogs.

Formality of the Chinese collective leadership.

We investigated the linguistic patterns in the discourse of four generations of the collective leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) from 1921 to 2012. The texts of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao were analyzed using computational linguistic techniques (a Chinese formality score) to explore the persuasive linguistic features of the leaders in the contexts of power phase, the nation's education level, power duration, and age. The study was guided by the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion, which includes a central route (represented by formal discourse) versus a peripheral route (represented by informal discourse) to persuasion. The results revealed that these leaders adopted the formal, central route more when they were in power than before they came into power. The nation's education level was a significant factor in the leaders' adoption of the persuasion strategy. The leaders' formality also decreased with their increasing age and in-power times. However, the predictability of these factors for formality had subtle differences among the different types of leaders. These results enhance our understanding of the Chinese collective leadership and the role of formality in politically persuasive messages.

Aplicación del diccionario ADL en la investigación psicosocial, con especial énfasis en el análisis del discurso político / The DLA dictionary aplication in psychosocial research with special emphasis on the analysis of political discourse

El autor presenta tres estudios del discurso político realizados con el algoritmo David Liberman (ADL). Dos de ellos se centran en el análisis de las redes de palabras y el tercero combina dicho nivel de análisis con el de los actos del habla.

The author presents three studies on political discourse, applying the David Liberman algorithm (DLA). Two of them are centered on the word net analysis and the third one combines the mentioned level of analysis with the speech acts one.