Browsing by Author "Blokker, Nico"

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Open Access
Analysis of political debates through newspaper reports : methods and outcomes
(2020) Lapesa, Gabriella; Blessing, Andre; Blokker, Nico; Dayanik, Erenay; Haunss, Sebastian; Kuhn, Jonas; Padó, Sebastian
Discourse network analysis is an aspiring development in political science which analyzes political debates in terms of bipartite actor/claim networks. It aims at understanding the structure and temporal dynamics of major political debates as instances of politicized democratic decision making. We discuss how such networks can be constructed on the basis of large collections of unstructured text, namely newspaper reports. We sketch a hybrid methodology of manual analysis by domain experts complemented by machine learning and exemplify it on the case study of the German public debate on immigration in the year 2015. The first half of our article sketches the conceptual building blocks of discourse network analysis and demonstrates its application. The second half discusses the potential of the application of NLP methods to support the creation of discourse network datasets.
Open Access
Between welcome culture and border fence : a dataset on the European refugee crisis in German newspaper reports
(2023) Blokker, Nico; Blessing, André; Dayanik, Erenay; Kuhn, Jonas; Padó, Sebastian; Lapesa, Gabriella
Newspaper reports provide a rich source of information on the unfolding of public debates, which can serve as basis for inquiry in political science. Such debates are often triggered by critical events, which attract public attention and incite the reactions of political actors: crisis sparks the debate. However, due to the challenges of reliable annotation and modeling, few large-scale datasets with high-quality annotation are available. This paper introduces DebateNet2.0 , which traces the political discourse on the 2015 European refugee crisis in the German quality newspaper taz . The core units of our annotation are political claims (requests for specific actions to be taken) and the actors who advance them (politicians, parties, etc.). Our contribution is twofold. First, we document and release DebateNet2.0 along with its companion R package, mardyR . Second, we outline and apply a Discourse Network Analysis (DNA) to DebateNet2.0 , comparing two crucial moments of the policy debate on the “refugee crisis”: the migration flux through the Mediterranean in April/May and the one along the Balkan route in September/October. We guide the reader through the methods involved in constructing a discourse network from a newspaper, demonstrating that there is not one single discourse network for the German migration debate, but multiple ones, depending on the research question through the associated choices regarding political actors, policy fields and time spans.