Title: Normative concepts analysis: unpacking the language of legitimation
Abstract: AbstractHow should we study the language of political legitimation? Incipient scholarship increasingly seeks to bridge the conceptual schism between the sociological is and the philosophical ought in the study of legitimacy, looking at public legitimating discourses to uncover the actual social attitudes toward prescriptive principles. And while this research agenda has recently gained traction, its methodology remains opaque. This paper suggests that normative concepts, central to the argumentations that hold common basic beliefs and discourse together, can allow us to tap into the language of legitimation. Normative concepts can be traced via mixed methods research, incorporating the quantitative method of corpus linguistics and the qualitative method of discourse-tracing – two techniques that mutually enrich and complement each other. By illuminating changes in the sort, scale, and scope of normative concepts, this mode of inquiry can explicate the language of legitimation and advance our understanding of sociopolitical legitimacy.Keywords: legitimationpublic political thoughtnormative concepts analysispolitical discoursecorpus linguisticsdiscourse-tracing AcknowledgementsAn Earlier version of this article was presented at the 2013 annual conference of the American Political Science Association. I thank Ruth Amossy, Matthew Evangelista, Piki Ish-Shalom, Markus Kornprobst, Amir Lupovici, Sinai Rusinek, Avraham Sela, Sasson Sofer, and Udi Sommer as well as the anonymous reviewers and the editors of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology, for their helpful comments and guidance.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-11-18
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 40
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